POST-STORAGE [Part 3]

I attended the FisherPoets reading at Labor Temple Diner and Bar in downtown Astoria to see my friend Tom Hilton perform. It was a wonderful and unique event. The venue was packed, standing room only. I have been attending poetry readings for decades, and I always love the ones that attach occupation to poetry practice (e.g., love me some Cowboy poets). Later, on a drive to Cannon Beach that included an astonishing NWC sunset, I asked Tom to get me a fisherman gig, so I can legitimately perform at next year’s gathering. I suggested it’s no different than Catholic high schools recruiting top athletes for their sports programs. He’s considering it very seriously, and he should, because I can do that muthaf*ckin’ poe-tree, y’all. Like Charlie Bukowski, we can go deeper, dear reader. Tonight, in tandem with writing this essay, part 3 of the Post-Storage sequence, I watched The Charles Bukowski Tapes, which I suggest the reader play as accompaniment for my text + images.

Geoff Cordner
"Salton City #1" [Edition, 1/25]
Photographic print (framed)
19" x 25"
2007
NFS

Photographer Geoff Cordner contributed "Salton City" in the AFHGC group exhibit "Buster." Geoff also marvelously documented the gallery and some of the projects, like Michael Brewster's performance, "Audition." We printed "Salton City" in-house.

For me, Geoff was then and continues to be a powerful visionary, an inspiration, whom I respect tremendously as a person and master of his medium. Nowadays, Geoff devotes much of his time and energy to long-distance running/racing and other demanding activities. An altogether extreme, sensitive, fierce and unique individual. *Note the reflections on the frame glass are not part of the print/art.

Authenticity has always been a thing in the arts, right? We owe this to Plato, and his jaundiced, republican perspective on artists. If you, O artist, are a priori designated a subversive illusionist, you’re going to take a defensive posture. After millennia of philosophical abuse from dead dude in a robe and his intellectual descendants in all kinds of quirky get-ups, no wonder we artists feel compelled to demonstrate how un-fake we are. And there’s always somebody shouting at us, the Man, the Judge, the social realist or the morals gangs, a church marm, a ghastly night manager with the ear of a king or prince. Dick Armey, Tom Delay, Adolph Hitler, I am looking directly at you! Decadent and obscene are simply flavors of FAKE! At the end of dumb things, as dumb time winds down, everything is totally fake and everyone is onto the sham, if they’re not on the take. The hollowed-out shambles of my country and quite a few others provide cover for the fabulous gay parties thrown by nitrous-sniffing cyborgs who once a year give a TED talk. I keep my ear to the tracks. Just last night my elder son mentioned the work stoppage on Bill Gates’ Chinese nuclear program. And how about Space X? Do you feel like we’re getting close?

THE ART FOR HUMANS GALLERY CHINATOWN OTTOMAN ∞

If you cannot rewrite history, which in fact must instead be overwritten endlessly until forgetfulness erases it, you can colorize it, or desaturate it, reduce it to black and white, to grayscale. Keep in mind, there will always be critics. For amplification, read Chris Hedges’ venomous assault on Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old. As a regular reader of Hedge’s over the past decade, and a fanboy of Jackson’s Tolkien films, I felt like a kid hiding behind the sofa listening to mom and dad argue in the kitchen. Hedges is a fanatic, and his anti-war, -masculine rhetoric strikes me as a kind of partial blindness. Demagogues as a class also hate art, when it does not reinforce their favored narratives, or undermines the primacy of the Word itself, as it (art) always should. Jackson on the other hand I get. If you can improve the thing, why wouldn’t you? Especially to memorialize a beloved relative? I would bracket Jackson’s effort with Robert de Niro’s homage to his father. I realize that false equivalence is a double-edged sword, but then movies aren’t paintings or sculptures, are they? A quality piece of furniture, however, can pleasantly add to the experience of art, a fireplace, a movie, even a super-stupid one like Christian Marclay’s forgettable phenom, The Clock. Did this guy really get all that attention for splicing together all those film bits, snippets of movies “the artist” did not produce. By the way, this is way cinema can not be classified as art. Not that corporate film people aren’t territorial and medium specific, when the novelty becomes the norm and technology threatens to shove the old winners out on their pompous, rich asses.

"DEATH [Recombined]"
Charcoal, Quin. Red/Gold, Stencil on Redwood Block, Technology
13.5" x 108" x 2"
2004
$2400

Created during Morris Graves Studio Residency and exhibited in "Bar Codes + Rituals + Subliminal Tapes. Ballerina figure (Molly) was drawn from photo data session hosted by Beckley Dance Theatre School (2003). The technology was added during the APFCW production.

I am working with Jennifer Robbins on the web site for my doctoral dissertation/thesis. The collaboration has been a magic catalyst for some essential resolution for the text + images, which will be first published in a virtual format, it appears. At present, my affiliation with European Graduate School is lapsed, probably permanently so. I have not entered another program. Which has not prevented me from continuing to work on the project. Today, I settled on a title: A THING (THERE IS NO SUCH THING): 4D art, practice and thinking. What do you think? A few minutes later, scanning search engine results for my prospective title, I discovered the essay that is the kernel for my thesis: Martin Heidegger’s "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought (Translated by Albert Hofstader in 1971). A massive find, and I am in a state of wonder and exultation. One has to have a lot of faith to engage in such an enormous undertaking, and approaching it as in the backwards (thunder dreamer) way only adds to that condition. More later. Finally, I think I’m resolved to use 2wovenform7 [see 2wf7 used in “7 Episodes at CGU (2006) in a simple projection configuration HERE] as my cover image/source material to introduce the text and website. Reviewing all the variations and derivations from the original marker sketch proved a revelatory activity in itself. It’s a happy day!

"White Cube #1"
Wood Box, Mixed Media on Lead-wrapped Wood
7.5" x 7.5" x 5.5"
2006
$1100

The cubic constructions were MFA projects inspired by Donald Judd. A couple of trips to Marfa and DIA Beacon and other sites where Judd works were permanently or temporarily installed added another dimension to my practice. Judd's art writing and reviews also had a profound impact.

Mercury Retrograde will be in effect most of March 2019. It’s a good time to reflect. Remember the White Cube, the platform for contemporary art, adopted by most serious contemporary art galleries round the globe, post-WW2? The White Cube (WC) has to a great degree been disrupted and displaced, creatively destroyed, by the art fair and its white cubicle. Now the white cubicle is being impinged upon by the selfie-shop and other market dynamics and forces, including the long-emerging web-based market for art. Note the Volta NYC 2019 crisis, and the deus ex machina intervention by Zwirner/Hort, Plan B. The spellbinding pace of disenfranchisement and disarray for almost everyone except the Big Box monopoly franchises for art could put the quickest artsy adapter in a neck brace. For Believers, it’s Old Testament Biblical: "They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind." It’s not as if change was avoidable, although the process might be very different. For a start the White Cube and Black Box could be formally conjoined, with a head shop serving as a hinge, and an adjoining lounge for after hours or outside-the-box happenings and goings-on in the format of Meow Wolf [LOL]. That’s 4D for ya, in a nutshell. While Earth melts down.

"White Cube #2"
Wood Box, Mixed Media on Lead-wrapped Wood
7.5" x 7.5" x 5.5"
2006
$1100

The cubic constructions were MFA projects inspired by Donald Judd. A couple of trips to Marfa and DIA Beacon and other sites where Judd works were permanently or temporarily installed added another dimension to my practice. Judd's art writing and reviews also had a profound impact.

Which has nothing to do much with my imagination, does it? A multi-use facility [MUF] is what I outlined to get into the Drucker School Masters in Arts and Cultural Management program a decade ago. The MUF is a conceptual architecture I have been testing, since the late 1980’s, starting with Freedom Gallery in Beckley, WV. I have over that time proven the viability of the 4D model, and its expansive, modular, nodal qualities, iterations, derivatives and configurations, which are linked to digital and analog media, applications, networks and devices. The main components are the classroom, the studio, the performance space, the storage area, the exhibition space, the archive/library, the shop, the lounge and the office. The studio consists of pre- and post- and production areas or modes. Given all those collective facets of the confab or unified whole, the peripherals and additive elements, especially in virtual domains infer the possible mirroring of content throughout the hemispheres of culture. The reach of the operation spans local2global in a logical arrangement. The all-directional nature of free sharing of free speech material and immaterial (content and context) across all existing platforms is invaluable, if one has an eye on the future platforms for art and the humanities, as an expression of science and enlightened, rational society.

Milo Santini
"Portrait"
Acrylic on Wood
8" x 15"
$1950

Call it "tactical art," call it "conceptual," call it a prank. In 1995 my fiancee and I created a neat scheme, which involved a complex narrative for an outsider artist named Milo Santini, painting naive-flavored artworks by said invented artist, then selling them in a hotel lobby boutique in downtown Santa Fe. The name "Milo Santini" was *borrowed* from the bride-to-be's uncle, a very successful and amiable hack impressionist called William. The operation succeed too well. The project began to go viral, and was retired (mostly) after a few very funny months. We sold almost all the Milo paintings. This is one of the few that remains.

The option remains to preserve the design fiction of an art business that is capable of doing anything more than provisioning the urges of the super-classes. Due to safety concerns, except for safari-like neo-expeditions, the international oligarchy reserves for itself the power of free movement, while contributing to the chaos and upheaval that ensures obstacles to free movement for the rest of us. If you get past the frustration to analyze the immediate effects, the W/inners are constructing prisons for themselves and their kind (not-Other) and using their inconceivable wealth, position, (reproductive) power to fabricate or superimpose fully materialized superstructures to serve their needs. Food, transportation, entertainment, energy, communication, exchanges/markets/economies, armies, etc, the global ultra-wealthy are securing for themselves, more or less super- or supra-nationally. They are paying for it all via the complex array of tax havens, shell corporations, money and property schemes, asset juggling, attended to armies of experts and conventional agents and agencies. They are paying off (corrupting) any public official they need to to grease the wheels of their burgeoning empire. They are exploiting corporate monopoly media tools for propaganda purposes, mostly to deflect, project and transfer any negative consequences or attention to other players. America, for instance, is not an Empire, but that is a widely dispersed assumption or media meme. How did the definition attach to the US democracy? Who benefits from the disinformation, which poisons the conversation against the nation itself, and interrupts the assignment of causation to the actor responsible for the circumstance?

"Paradise"
Acrylic (Quin. Red/Gold) on Door
80" x 32"
2005
$6500

First exhibited in "A Prayer for Clean Water," with a stuffed bird hanging from the top of the panel, suspended in the upper center area. To my recollection no one asked what the meaning of the construct might be. Maybe it was explicit enough. The Quinacridone Red-Gold is practically burnished on the substrate surface.

Most of us would probably rather attend our lives, our families, our business, our interests, our loves, than pursue answers to broad social questions that nag at us. Because more and more people are exposed to the fraying of our communities in all dimension due to the rot of inequality, it becomes more difficult to ignore the reality. The problem is now a list of grievances: homelessness, joblessness, addiction and other kinds of madness, endless war, mass poverty or imprisonment; made intolerable, because our popular desire is not satisfied by our elected leaders, who have almost to a person been bought off my their masters. A sense of betrayal pervades our discourse, simultaneous to the lack of practical recourse to enact progressive change, to improve society, to leave a better for the generation to follow ours. America was founded to some extent on the idea of the Ideal, as much as it was founded on the practices of exploitation and extraction. The promise of America is intertwined in a Paradise narrative, that only partially represents the motivation of Americans. The conflict between the narratives is obvious to the world, and has been obfuscated by those whose selfish interests benefit from the conversion of Paradise into Hell for all but themselves.

"Clann Ghill-eain"
Acrylic on Canvas
8" x 20"
1995
$1250

Painted in Aberdour, Fife Scotland, "Clann Ghill-eain" was initially exhibited in "My Own Private Glencoe" at the An Tuirreann Arts Centre, then in the Electric Frog Internet Cafe on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, and again in "Where My Feet Stick to the Ground" in the Peanut Gallery in Nashville, TN (1995-6). Since then I pop this one into exhibits now and again. It is after all a kind of signature, my name, my tribal affiliation, a big part of who I am.

For some of us born native into this centuries-long American Experiment, it is become quite a task to unpack or unwind the true from the false about this country, which (spectrum of fact) is complicated, often by design. The framework of the nation when it was established is visionary, which is why it has been widely emulated by other visionaries, and attacked relentlessly by those for whom liberation social vision is an existential threat. The subversion of the Thing, and the consequent effective reduction of objectivity as means by which consensus in obtainable to a base state, continuum for enshrining formal stupidity to supplant the Thing itself ~ this is what passes now for good faith concourse, or bonafide free speech. Schismatic conduct is prioritized over the creatively seductive entreaty, or call and response induction. Reciprocation is divorced from autonomy, instead of being correctly understood as a timely process, a sequential event, a serial enterprise. The accumulation of wisdom is thus converted into a parody of itself, performance gluttony. The brute force of data visualization functions like that. There is nothing artistic in it all, whatever its advocates claim. It is a lie told with tools that purport neutrality. The corrosion and eventual usurpation of ancient standards of measure are the goals of the advocacy.

"DRAFT"
Mixed Media (Quin. Red-Gold) on Redwood
12" x 11
2005
$1000

"Draft" was started at Morris Graves' studio and finished during production of APFCW in Austin. The title refers both to professional sport and the military. Maybe "draft" also is suggestive of the process, of the BETA version. 1982 was the year I graduated from high school and 82 was one of the numbers I wore when I played football.

Enforced service to a common cause is the representation of a disordering matrix. An artist is usually very sensitive to the notion, whether the draft refers to military service, sports team operations, or sketching an imaginary object into a real thing. Connecting the dots and disconnecting them are divergent activities. If one’s dots are perceptual (see Kusama) then random applications are a means of combining all three types of draft into a unified social medium, which can be situated in contemporary art as an ersatz lab experiment, a project, fun, decoupled from war, from sport as a metaphor for colonial slave-based, mercenary commercial game systems, and Big A art itself. The induction procedures, the protocols of Church and King, and the art that justifies and rationalized the Order they represent, are reinforced in the command and control role of the Artist supervising the fake collective experience. The anti-democratic bent in so-called conceptual, performance, tactical, etc. contemporary “arts” is often traceable to a foreign patronage franchise. The passionate support for the alien, for alienation as a central topic, the prioritizing of the abject and strange experience of outsiders constitute a subject matter whose true focus is subjugation porn. The normalizing of mass reaction, from outrage and repulsion to exhaustion and compliance, is the point.

"Vision-counter [+ Transmission]"
Linolium-wrapped Particle Board, Electronic Components, Transparencies, Silver Tape + more
67" x 19"
2005
$3400

I have never really had what I thought was an adequate narrative "Vision-counter." However, my sense satisfaction with the assemblage is very strong. My memories of its conception are vague, even mysteriously so. "Vision-counter" seems to me to effectively represent aesthetic ambivalence toward the digital, the electronic, Benjamin's arguments on art and reproduction, or other's on technology, objectivity, the domestic and other contemporary concerns. 4D puts material and immaterial together more humanely, equitably, which is to say, logically.

The artist is encouraged to recycle garbage to produce “original” contemporary art. The oligarch joke in that trope is the inversion of waste models, which are part and parcel of Capitalist Civilization. The Marxist acquisition of means of production (of waste) reduces and consigns all praxis to the garbage heap. Junk is only redeemable in the scarcity model domestic economy, in the Collection of the Patron of the Arts, whose Eye saves art from disappearance and re-imagines it in a Canon, a sanctioned History agreed upon over time by the most powerful Few, the Survivors, the Old Families, as in “fantasy” Game of Thrones. Most of humanity is fodder for the cannibilizing drama depicted via the neo-serial small screen cinema, the dream machine for the new Gilded Age. The medium itself is a veritable dimensionist phenomenon, but not in the way the Media represent it (the medium), except when pressed by inconvenient opposition or just skepticism. The medium is the prime vehicle of the global surveillance network, a cornerstone of behavioral assessment and adjustment. The medium is the mind of management enforced, the foremost weapon for inducing madness on a massive scale. Fomenting sedition is the business of corporate media syndicates. Cultural erasure is the aim of the global hegemony appointed to C-Class executive seats on board of the “mainstream media.” The central characteristic of the artificial media personhood is cynicism, as a mask for anti-social psychosis, ultimately predicting episodes of genocide, and possibly extinction of the species (excepting the Survivors, of course). The most nefarious conflation evident in mass corporate media blurs the line between salvation and survival. With respect to art, the distinction is profound.

"Thunder Dreamer #1" [A/P]
CONTENT Portfolio #1
Digital Print
19" x 13"
2007
$1250

Each CONTENT portfolio contains 48 prints. The source material spans my early film photography (ca. 1982-3) through the MFA cycle (2006-8), including images produced for exhibition in the exhibits at Claremont Graduate University, Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown and Yarger|Strauss Contemporary. "Thunder Dreamer #1" combines a PJM Pattern with a figurative element, the Thunder Dreamer, which started as a sketch and eventually appeared in multiple iterations, multimedia.

I won’t get to the Guggenheim in time to see the Hilma af Klint exhibit in Manhattan. The NY Times calls it a “revelation.” The press materials push a narrative that af Klint disrupts contemporary art history, that she displaces the white male progenitor, art hero history for symbolic color, theoretical abstraction and so on. The chronology is the basis for this argument for revision of the modern art story. Presumably, the driver of the reformation is in synch with the institutional redefinition of global art, as indicated by the MoMA shift. Af Klint jibes nicely with the urgent serum for cultural misogyny. I won’t see the Mapplethorpe photography exhibit at the Gugg either. The museum will not likely be protested and litigated, as it was in Cincinnati in 1990. The cultural map has been redrawn and continues to be. Heteronormative iconography is rarely produced for mass distribution, absent snark and irony. Not to say that channels for un-Gay content don’t exist. They do. What are they? More importantly, what are the supporting narratives for material that is produced specifically for “traditional” families, and is this a matter of content consumption, production, or dispersion. The privatization of a public imagination is almost total. The American Dream operates “more like a business,” clearly, but what is that business? For whom is it profitable, for whom is it power-providing, for whom does it increase reproductive capacity? Most importantly, how is it sustainable, and who does it sustain?

"Abstraction Forms Thought #6"
Acrylic on Wood
Variable Dimensions (@10" x 10")
1995
$925

The "Abstraction Forms Thought" series arose from conversations with Richard Tuttle, during my the period I was employed at Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe in the mid-90s. Richard was producing his Venice Biennale project at Goldleaf. He was a guest on my "Art Talk" radio program a couple of times, and once brought the Vogels by for an on-air interview. Richard's show at the Santa Fe Museum of Art and our conversations had a deep impact on my work and aesthetics at that time.

The privatization of space travel redefines man’s imaginary exploration of space, of the universe in conformity with preceding eras of colonial enterprise. America concedes its skyward gaze to the billionaire set. The oligarchic survivalist moves into the future budgeted to pursue riches in the far reaches of the galaxy, equipped with infinite life and technological supremacy, minus any accountability to, well, anyone or -thing (governing body) in the universe. Likely in the company of robot sex toys (pleasure devices) and war machines designed to never harm their owners. I would suggest all these fantasies arise from the aura of artificial personhood, except that peculiar legal construct, the modern version, the corporation is a relatively novel un-thing/thing, the creation of which refuses to make itself (AI) in its own image, but instead causes (as in collateral damage) the destructive change of actual personhood in the image of the artificial its manifest cause for existence. We do not yet know if the Universe is not wide enough to contain the mutating power of artificial personhood, for it to be subsumed in the body of creation. The conquest of personhood by the formulated legal definition of personhood is the defining feature of the dystopian present, particularly outside the gates of compounds for the plutocracy. It is not the poor who consume KFC. It is the other way round, despite the pantomimes of the present occupant of the White House, when he entertains sport champions. The cartoons of robots with people inside them, saving humanity, preventing catastrophe, protecting us from our enemies - these comics are metaphorical representations of corporate power, which fails utterly anytime it does anything other than make money for its investors, owners and executives, and to lesser degree, management.

"Ohm"
Digital Print on Perforated Adhesive Vinyl [A/P]
24" x 12"
2001
$1800

"Ohm" features Diane Avice du Buisson who was my yoga teacher then and still is today. Diane performed in the 01 production "A Cold Empty Feelin'" at ruby green Contemporary Art Foundation, hosted my exhibition "Jewels of the Nagas" at her shala Yoga Source and provided photographic material for a series of digital prints on vinyl, one of which was displayed at YS. The substrate for this experimental print was provided by one of the Nashville printers I did BETA testing for, either Chromatics or another one who's name I can't recall at the moment.

No doubt the media sphere produces in the churning deluge of its DDoS-like waves of information, cascading images + texts that pop like popcorn into user feeds. The bombardment of Tesla and Elon Musk (who really is behind this campaign anyway?), with periodic briefs on the latest car to smash into a tree or highway divider or building and killing the driver, fails to mesh properly with Musk’s extraterrestrial activities. It also inadequately meshes with Musk getting baked with Joe Rogan, selling a flamethrower and being slapped with contempt of court suits by US government agencies. The Mad Inventor stereotype (or archetype) brushes up against the Mad Billionaire Inventor stereotype due to the financialization of the global economy, but the precedents are there, and have been for centuries, if not ages. I attended a lecture a couple of years ago by Dr. Allan Chapman at Oxford’s Christ Church Upper Library that outlined the contributions of Tycho Brahe to global speculation, travel and conquest, via technological advances in the fields of navigation using applied astronomy. Musk and Brahe seem to me to fit nicely in a category of some sort. The crux of personality in science and art transits a fine line between novelty and catastrophe. The social media-attached news feed, rooted in dumb or retarded algorithms, hashing out the oxymoronic Artificial Intelligence for today’s distracted or casual Apple News or Yahoo News or Facebook reader, tends to stack clickable freak show tales over T & A celebrity filth over the bilge of gotcha journalism, disaster porn and police blotter fodder. Good luck maintaining equanimity in that environment of detached, quasi-fictional experience!

"Boo-K Array [Spatial Wovenform]"
Mixed Media on Japanese Watercolor Paper
80" x 80"
2006-7
$10000

"Boo-K Array" was created during my MFA studies and was only exhibited in "re-FUSED" at AFHGC. The surface is pretty unprecedented. The watercolor paper I purchased at a specialty store for artist and craft paper supply at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. They told me it was the largest sheet of Japanese watercolor available in America at the time. As substrates go, to state this one is an artistic challenge and blessing is a manifest understatement.

The concern from a media philosophy standpoint arguably is sustenance. The question is whether the criteria fits the media, because an agent can always claim, like Jon Stewart did, that his job is entertainment. The Gladiator meme (“Are you not entertained?”) riffs on the real issue. The stuff humans have done, are doing and will do for entertainment is eyebrow-raising , to say the least, by any current measure of prudence, sensibility, morality or even legality, depending on the situational citation or anecdote. Boredom is the bane of the Wise. Boredom is the mother of Entertainment and the starter or Master of Wars. The popular cultural analyst is attentive to the Bored demographic, because the click-hungry virtual media must be fed, and the bored user is a target, because the bored user is a mark for consumptive addiction pushers. To promise the Bored an endless supply of respite from their affliction (boredom) is to hack or bridge the complex abyss of engagement that separates the balkanized Self from all not-Self material or immaterial. To deliver is to hatch a junkie, who will gobble at the trough of your deliverable until you cease to deliver. Sure, once the stream is set up, the patterns of feeding established, the terms of payment arranged, the quality of time modified then minimized, the media pimp or pusher can squeeze the junkie ruthlessly and relentlessly.

"Thunderdreamer"
Acrylic on Panel
84" x 84"
2007
$14000

"Thunderdreamer" moves forward, looking over his shoulder (backwards). I also see this figure in transition, assuming Garudasana, the eagle pose/asana. The pre-production for "Thunderdreamer" was an hybrid process, integrating traditional and digital or alternative media. The painting began with a sketch. From there the refinement of the image moved into print processing, then cut vinyl output and projection, via moving image (animation and multi-channel video), as well as web-based distribution.

In due course, which is to say, over time, Boredom is the harbinger of atrophy. The best cure for atrophy is Shock. It is a savage cycle. An incidental, accidental or collatoral value of contemporary art is its trackable nature, which owes much to the convention of the archive morphing into its virtual mutation the database. The art world feasts not only on boredom but also on the Bored. It cultivates them, because in the networks of the super-wealthy exist a great variety of species of the Bored: the Pampered; the Pretending; the Pantomiming; and so on. Once all one’s natural needs are met, and one is saturated, if not satiated by plenty, beyond enough, the attractiveness of boredom is the fashion of realism. The cruel direct their boredom to the exponent of cruelty, which is a sinister pursuit indeed. Pleasure seekers who descend into boredom crave satisfaction beyond desire, and find the banal, the nullification of the body as a giver to please the mind. The residual sensation of touch becomes a hateful reminder of passion lost or wasted and replaced by the binary patterns of boredom and satisfaction, the processes of which reduce to the Identical. Boredom is the seed bearer of the Covetous. To covet is to know the urge to horde, to collect, to gather for oneself everything, which is the opposite of a Thing.

"Pyrrole Red Pixel Painting"
Acrylic on Cut Canvas
10" x 9"
2007
$975

The Pixel Painting series is my answer to the technical question the so-called Minimal artists proposed regarding an interstices between 2D and 3D artist practice, and object specificity. I worked on the Pixel Paintings during my MFA program at CGU, but the real solution for the proposition above I found in the Topos series of 4D VyNIL. The Pixel Paintings are the substrates for the Topos Paintings. The raised paint effect is created using heavy body Golden acrylics, pressed between similar surfaces, then carefully separated. My CGU MFA peer Quinton Bemiller has done a lot with this technique.

The intensity of the encounter is a feature of contemporary art presentation practice. Precisely how the viewer comes to art is a function of management, marketing, buzz, plus the architecture of the installation and the thought that goes into shaping the encounter. The viewer experience balances physicality, proximity, emotional content, visual context and chance, plus more. No encounter can be conclusive, nor should an installer strive for conclusion. A few years ago the Met in NYC displayed “The Boxer,” and then the Michelangelo drawings. In my (4D) assessment both were terrible exhibition failures. The mass of viewers destroyed the zone for exchange that must exist for art. The problem from an administrative point of view is balancing the concept of permanence and the temporary with value and meaning. The lens through which arts management peers at a masterpiece is tinted by the urgency of compromise, concession and critique. Contemporary arts management is underwritten by the absolute imperative to fail art, but not too badly. Meanwhile, achieving corporate goals, private or non-profit, is the paramount duty of management. Those goals are set by committee, in tandem with accounting, reflecting the necessities of development, as well as the focus of the institutional master or masters, owners or prime stakeholders. Maybe a museum cultivates and counts numbers - of visitors, of hits on its website, of dollars in its general fund. The corporate fiduciary duty will impose itself over the imaginary infinite lifetime of its artificial personhood, quite simply because that is its function and design.

"Baudrillard [Simulation & Simulacra]"
Ammo Crate, Metal Slugs, Toy Gun, Acrylic Paint, Charcoal
18" x 26" x 14"
2006
$2800

"Baudrillard" was initially exhibited in "7 Episodes" at the CGU art building Project Gallery. The reference to Baudrillard is a post-EGS titular superimposition. My appreciation of this 4D installation element grows with time. The pistol is a toy from my childhood, over-painted with luminescent acrylic. I believe I picked up the slugs in Austin. The charcoal was gathered after the Show Low wildfires. The crate came from that IE army surplus store where I acquired Army Joe.

What does it take to kill an artificial person? An artificial pistol? Where does one bury an artificial person, or does on cremate it? We witness the demise of corporations frequently enough to know something must happen. What is the proper ritual? Who does one invite to the wake, to the burial? The erasure of a corporate charter is a profound event. According to the Court, artificial people possess the right to Free Speech, and that mode of expression may take form of money, which is fungible. Should the company logo be buried with the dead corporation. Should company cars, a fleet if the size of the corporation warrants it, be interred with the dead artificial personhood? Should all actual persons employed by the company face the same fate as the company to which they have linked their destiny? Indemnification is a key characteristic of the legal profile of the artificial person. Does this feature extend post mortem? These and other questions apply to contemporary art, which is integral to corporate identity on many levels, and travels through the artificial person syndicates into actual, private person networks and nodes and back into the corporate fold, sometimes with nothing but the stroke of a pen. Provenance, acquisition and deaccessioning are the on- and off-ramps of contemporary art in transition. These are points at which the secondary market, the auction house, the insurance broker, and the collector adjudicate the flow of art between private and public spheres. To say the system is rigged is to state the obvious, given the available market data and anecdotal accounts of its practical performance. The reality of the art industry is dimensional and does not reduce to, for instance, matters of currency and taste.

"ArtStar"
Digital Print on Vinyl with Grommets
48" x 48'
2004
$7250

"ArtStar" features a model/figure shot on 35mm black and white film. The image was scanned from the contact sheet. There are many layers in "ArtStar," which is output on vinyl banner material and presented on the nail/grommet system. "ArtStar" was originally exhibited in "Bar Codes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes" in AFH Gallery Eureka. The exhibit was sponsored by the Morris Graves Foundation, Ink People Center for the Arts and Riverwind, LLC. I forget the printer who output "ArtStar" for us during the project. Very nice people.

The Art Star is a marvelous fiction. Media dissolves the history of art so fast the bubbles of notoriety barely have a moment to reach the social surface. The insistence of those who argued successfully that art, like all else, must run more like a business, in their shallow heyday, sought to apply the Brand to artists. Dumb and desperate artists believed their hype. The corporations monopolizing art commerce adored the momentum branding enjoyed in the ranks of competition artists propelled by their BFA and MFA programs into the thick jungle combat of artistic careerism. The only winners were the galleries who could afford to endlessly grow their stables, without spending a penny, who, in other words, possessed A-List Branding themselves, and the raunchy players who leveraged brand identity into various episodes of exploitation and depravity on the fringes of art world conventions, fairs, festivals, bi- or triennials and every other convergence of the artsy elites, public and private. The BRAVO network art show starring Jerry Saltz and other notables, Work of Art, proved a hilariously ghastly new media abortion of a program. Work of Art itself puts to rest the nominal genre of reality TV, and thank heavens the zombie effect never revivified that abomination. WoA did have value, though. It revealed much about how TV studio people view the artist, the art world, art and the power of media, their medium.

"Pattern Print #6 [A/P]"
Epson Inkjet Print on Archival Paper
Image Size: 60" x 42"
2006
$2400

The Pattern series represent a point of resolution in my technical and theoretical progression as a digital printmaker. They were constructed and executed during my MFA course at CGU. Key components are: pixel level manipulations of source images; small-to-large techniques; dynamic symmetry; Photoshop-based dimensionist layering and pictorial layering with effects; and more. The series is stylistically inspired most by Scottish Tartan and Native American weaving and ceramics patterning. That said, the overall method is Real.Pure.Digital. The Patterns were tested in multiple formats on multiple substrates, using a variety of printers. This print was first exhibited at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown.

The emergence of viable online marketplace alternatives [which span EBAY, Saatchi, Artsy and a host of template or CMS-driven experimental gallery formats and funding/purchasing formats, including subscription, dealer-down, percentage of sale models] has pinched the tail of the actual market. For a couple of decades the inevitable demise of the “real” marketplace seems just around the bend. The economic reality remains: the proportion of actual to virtual is 60-40%; for a crisper picture of the field dynamics, which are not art biz specific, see Chip Cox. Yet we can discern patterns from the classroom to studio to gallery to museum and the academy, bookstore, archive or collection, cycling through form into substance and back to form over time. The art world pattern outside time is superficial and susceptible to pendulum swing-like shifts in taste, interest, attention, whatever. The contemporary art pattern on the other hand resembles deep, invisible market flow, perceptible to elite analysts capable of immediate projection and value prediction. Most outsider/insider configurations are not-unexpected evacuations of the contemporary art sphere. Push and pull motion for the optical experience is a recognizable facet of the medium itself. The estimation of distance, which requires conception of center, propels the shared intuition of acceptable, practical intervals to separate (and bind) de-centralized events, nodes and materials. The program must be temporal-spatial in order for it (the program) to work, much less serve the field like a utility. The major auction houses were really the first syndicate to solve the logistics, primarily because they had the material resources to invest in the solution, but also because they exist outside most regulatory scrutiny, most of the time.

"Pattern Print #6 [A/P]"
Epson Inkjet Print on Archival Paper
Image Size: 60" x 42"
2006
$2400

The Pattern series represent a point of resolution in my technical and theoretical progression as a digital printmaker. They were constructed and executed during my MFA course at CGU. Key components are: pixel level manipulations of source images; small-to-large techniques; dynamic symmetry; Photoshop-based dimensionist layering and pictorial layering with effects; and more. The series is stylistically inspired most by Scottish Tartan and Native American weaving and ceramics patterning. That said, the overall method is Real.Pure.Digital. The Patterns were tested in multiple formats on multiple substrates, using a variety of printers. This print was first exhibited at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown.

[Installation View]

The latest venture to cross my radar is Artfare. I like it for a few reasons. The model conjoins a nice mix of stuff you would want such an operation to make doable. Artfare is a website. It is a virtual gallery. Artfare is pushed through virtual platforms via direct contact. They have a good list. Artfare is an app. It facilitates face to face meetings between collectors and artists. It is a GPS-enabled device. The product can therefore be data. Analysis and diagnostics can be the product. Production (manufacturing) is done by someone else (the artist), somewhere else (other than the Artfare business office). Art is sexy tech. The artist list (stable) is curated. The platform is slow-grow, and exclusive, which indicates pragmatic management, but slow grow/exclusive also indicates a specific type of tech to market engineering. The launch is NYC-based/centric. For an artist, Artfare represents a market change. The destruction of the middle market for art translates to opportunity for other segments of the industry. There is potential for an artist studio to morph into a platform, to be reconfigured as a multi-use facility, to maximize the value of the artist Brand and the value of studio production. One can already see this occurring in the Art Star class over the past 30 years or so. I’m looking at you all: Hirst, Koons, Kusama, Murakami, down the line! The rogues’ gallery! The truth is, the upper reaches of the power artist elite more or less require one to maintain a factory for inclusion in the Serious set. Nostalgia for the Pollock mode of making has gone the way of the dodo, along with nostalgia, and art, as such.

"Pattern Print #4 [A/P]"
Epson Inkjet Print on Archival Paper
Image Size: 60" x 42"
2006
$2400

The Pattern series represent a point of resolution in my technical and theoretical progression as a digital printmaker. They were constructed and executed during my MFA course at CGU. Key components are: pixel level manipulations of source images; small-to-large techniques; dynamic symmetry; Photoshop-based dimensionist layering and pictorial layering with effects; and more. The series is stylistically inspired most by Scottish Tartan and Native American weaving and ceramics patterning. That said, the overall method is Real.Pure.Digital. The Patterns were tested in multiple formats on multiple substrates, using a variety of printers. This print was first exhibited at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown.

If the artist embraces the superstructure that incorporates capital, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, property (real, intellectual and objective), management versus labor, accounting, inventory, HR, and so on, then the artist should expect the product of the system to conform to other like systems. Does such art satisfy? Is art ever tantamount to a product? I have a problem first of all with the assumption that anything put into words equates to art. The inequality of word to art is as extreme as the imbalance between haves and have-nots, which at least exist on a scale of agreement, whose poles are The Name and The Number. That Which Is Writable or Which Can Be Said need not be expressed as art to exist. The thinkable includes art, although art is not contained only in the thinkable. Art can express as the unthinkable. The truth in the unwritable, unsayable, unthinkable thing is in its absence from a beginning proscribed in any divine word we know of. Art clearly is not Biblical. Art does not have its Genesis in a Jewish tribal religious manuscript. The viral media phenomenon of that Word and the absence of art from it (the Talmud/Bible) is one of the historical cornerstones of Western Civilization, which, like everything has discovered and explored art, converted or conquered it, extracted it from its Nature and exploited it, and then used it to justify and rationalize Civilization itself. Civilized art, in its own Word is Tautological.

"Pattern Print #4 [A/P]"
Epson Inkjet Print on Archival Paper
Image Size: 60" x 42"
2006
$2400

The Pattern series represent a point of resolution in my technical and theoretical progression as a digital printmaker. They were constructed and executed during my MFA course at CGU. Key components are: pixel level manipulations of source images; small-to-large techniques; dynamic symmetry; Photoshop-based dimensionist layering and pictorial layering with effects; and more. The series is stylistically inspired most by Scottish Tartan and Native American weaving and ceramics patterning. That said, the overall method is Real.Pure.Digital. The Patterns were tested in multiple formats on multiple substrates, using a variety of printers. This print was first exhibited at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown

[Installation View]

A normal, real (not-artificial) person can only comprehend the Tautology of the Word of Civilization through a fictional medium. Art is not fictional, although so much of art represents or depicts false narratives. The preset narrative of art is fictional, like all preset narrative. Nothing in art is predetermined. The craft aspects of an art object however are another thing altogether. The entirety of a good stretcher, frame, prepared substrate, paint and so on, is a prepared to artistic specifications. The compatibility of the determinate and indeterminate aspects of art is a function of the unifying quality of the process by which art appears and remains apparent. The time function of art is resisted through craft and proven over time. The quality of art is simultaneously autonomous and contingent within the determined material features of art, which features help designate art as art for a viewer, but also function to conserve the art itself for as long as possible, in the best condition possible. Re-litigating this point never succeeds in destroying art and its complementary craft elements. The longevity of art and art crafts contradicts, for instance, painting’s death, in the same way that breath contradicts the mortality of a person. One can argue the person is deceased, but as long as the person continues to breathe, death has yet to arrive. The question of whether art will outlast humanity is unknowable. The more interesting question would be, “What would be the point, if art outlasts humanity?”

"Cowboy [3/4 Pose 2 Gun Hart]"
Mixed Media (Painted Frame with Silver Tape and Adhesive Prints)
13.5" x 11.5"
1997-2006
$950

One of the original COWBOYZ + COWGIRLZ "2 Gun Hart" series first exhibited at Four Crows Gallery, later at Dreamworks SKG (Nashville). Additional layers and materials added for "A Prayer for Clean Water" cycle of exhibits in Austin. This piece was installed at Pump Project for "Overflow Show."

The ubiquity of the corporate presence presupposes un-being as the preeminent culture driver in line with the syndicate fiat, the credit card. The dangerous imaginary money of corporate money demands a never-ending supply of corporate cultural production, the cult of entertainment. The hilarious episodes of Captain Marvel and Ghostbusters (2016 version) illustrate the confounding of the marketeers pushed by HR departments, responding to C-Class fatwas, being woke to focus group results and kept up-to-data by politico-demographers whose kids will go to school at Harvard or Stanford or MIT or Oxford. What confounds the PR set? The defiant, dissatisfied and well-informed consumer who refuses to be made compliant to the short-term ROI necessities of public-corp existence. When disenfranchised choose not to accept blame and project guilt in the social exchange, and surrender to the commodity rehabilitation programming of corp-soc systems, they annoy the entitled masters of the economy. One of the most bizarre features of the post-2007-8, as the Austerity (for the 99%, not those who caused the crisis through fraud and other criminal behavior, and just plain greed) regime was contrived and implemented from the top-down, was the drumbeat from elites chastising the victims. Even as banks, hedge funds, insurers, ratings agencies, co-opted bureaucrats, corrupted politicians, law dogs, academics/economists, captured journalists, ministers preaching on the godliness of wealth, and so many in the professional, “white collar” classes almost to a person got away with their part in the most massive bottom-2-top redistribution of goods and money in human history, the industrial mouthpieces from each sector explained to the pillaged classes that they would need to expect less, suffer more and not blame anyone for what “happened.” As if the scam was tantamount to weather.

"DIM TIM: Prince of Death"
Acrylic (Quin. Red-Gold) on Redwood
16" x 12"
2004
$1450

"Prince of Death" was painted during my Morris Graves studio residency. I think of these paintings as 4D allegories, and fictional representation, and also modular, consisting of elements that combine to establish compositions of infinite variety. The Cyclops has a sonic society/media eye, a timeline mouth, and his costume suggests an imaginary cinema, and I sometimes think of these as stills for yet-to-be-produced movies, or other-dimensional already-produced movies.

In a way it is unfortunate that our perceptual capacity is enlarged to the extent that simple, 2D caricature is not as viscerally gratifying as it has been in the past. Possibly one upside from the threat of an era for Chinese global conquest is a retooling of 2D practice. In fact, the phenomenon has been happening since the East and West “opened up” to each other over the past several centuries. The Postwar tech revolution in Asia, to which so much manufacturing has been relocated - to destroy the labor movement in Europe and America and enrich the Geek-plutocracy and the stock exchanges/investors they prop up - has produced a collateral effect. The aesthetics and design principles of the Orient have of course migrated to and saturated computer-/device-rooted, networked New Media. What does that mean? It is as stupendous moment for contemporary art, for one thing, and this reflects the phenomenon in Postwar Europe, especially Germany, where art, particularly painting, uncorked and a remarkable blossoming occurred. Corporate global syndicates, a few consumptive governments, and all the new international millionaires and billionaires would love to co-opt the artsy upside to World War, mass population displacement, and the technologies attaching. What do they really deserve? If one studies the era at depth, carefully, it becomes obvious that the rich bastard classes derived enormous, even unimaginable wealth, prestige and reproductive power in all the usual ways: through extraction and exploitation, predatory lending, fraudulent and deceptive practices, opportunism, graft, grift and cons, economic blackmail, third-party force; basically stealing and cheating. See William K. Black for a sober perspective. The fix was in.

"Unconditioned Line (Wovenform) #7"
Acrylic on Metallum
54" x 72"
2004
$9500

"Unconditioned Line #7" was created during my Riverwind LLC residency, for which I BETA tested the amazing and diverse selection of Metallum fabrics for artistic purposes. Ultimately, I settled on a few applications, and the Tuttle-inspired intertwining, 4D-inferring linear forms. UC(WF) #7 was first exhibited at "Bar Codes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes" and in 2005 at the Pump Project "Overflow Show."

The conceit of ‘programmable matter” in the Bill and Melinda Gates constellation of global interventions is intertwined with speculative venture investment in a global vision in sharp divergence from the pre-Crash 2007 conception of humanity and our modes of social organization. The tech-takeaway in the aftermath of Y2K and the tech-bubble bursting, and many other temporary upheavals and imaginary catastrophes in the field, must be that no monopoly-busting regulator, no sensible opposition, no accounting measure, will dent the veneer of the FUTURE. Yet, impossibly, politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and US House Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are coming out, calling for the breaking up of Big 5 tech. Europe implemented substantive privacy regimes for American-based internet companies, although corporate media muffled the importance of these rulings. The power to control messaging on issues affecting the operations of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Netflix and Facebook is not complete, obviously, and the capacity to restrain FAANG domination still exists. The movement toward a global resistance to all manifestations of international supremacist plutocracy is iterative. It does not appear with the emergence of any particular technology. Nano-, algo-, bio-tech, IoT, AI, Cloud, Big Data and so on all are part of a dimensional system that in unequally delivered to the world it affects. The technological conquest of everything presupposes the neo-Conquistador replacing the thing with nothing, then taking the thing, while everyone (except the conqueror) is absorbed by nothing. So far the plan is working 99% of the time, almost everytime.

Ted Gevrez
"Mariachis de la Muerte"
Mixed Media on Canvas
36" x 16"
1990 [?]
NFS

"Red" Ted Gevrez was an outsider artist (literally), who homesteaded on Monte Luna, overlooking Santa Fe. He was a Vietnam vet and the man who took me to my first 12-Step meeting, on a blue moon night. I have many Red Ted tales. He was a noted City Different character for years, marching around Santa Fe, leading an endlessly variable pack of dogs, hauling gallons of water, dumpster diving, hanging out on the Plaza, at open-air weekend art fairs by the Chapel at Loretto, on street corners or under the Agua Fria bridge. I owe this man my life, and I love this painting. I miss his smile of few teeth and endless string of mostly awful jokes, which made me laugh until my face hurt, when I first got sober. I have no idea where he is today, or what he is doing, but I hope he is well and wish him the very best.

We are by necessity predisposed to fall backwards into the “sharing economy.” The Obama “HOPE” PR message and the propaganda for social media as a one-way wealth. Understanding a thing as a gift is essential to accepting art on its own terms. The debasement of “sharing” is possible within the economy of dereliction, but the amputation of sharing from human society causes circular devastation with certainty. To rationalize the purposeful dejection of humanity is to posit madness as an article of exchange. The permeability of the democratic social fabric, a feature inherent in free society for free exchange, can be exploited. The protocols of exploitation by now are well defined, proven in fact. The effects are demonstrably scalable. A challenge to the exploiter must be mounted to defend freedom. The successful confusion of cause and reflection ensures the agent of exploitation will succeed. The diligence of the citizen to soberly assess the condition of freedom is a responsibility both personal and collective. The imperative of art is its gift as freedom of expression, consisting of elements for the individual and of the commons. Art is made of things. It is made of elements like cadmium. Art’s mediums are water, oil, plastic polymer, etc. Other substances that make art art are clay, stone, wood, cotton or linen. Anyway, the art object is made of things, which make it the thing it is, and a human being or group of us are the medium that make the art thing, too. The thing art is irrelevant without more people to receive art, but this reception is not a taking. To experience art is to receive freedom in the modality of gift giving and reception.

"013Topo"
Mixed Media on Board
13 3/4" x 12"
2006
$1100

"013Topo" represents hybrid analog/digital processes, combining print, paint and plastic. The "color" of the Underpainting series is a subtle mix of metallics, glazes and tints, plus poly-media, more of a sensation than hue. "013Topo" appears in the early post-QuinRG phase. The Underpainting series was an MFA project at CGU. These selection (013+014) have never been exhibited.

To attribute an energy dynamic to art imprints the thing with poetics. The danger of associating poetry and art arises from the compulsion of the Word in any configuration. That is, until 4D fiction is established and comprehended. The inculcation of form by contextual representation is metaphorical. Idealism is a priori a rebuttal of existence in the present. Poetry does not have to be ideological to indoctrinate a thing, because language will do that for poetry and the poet. Command in language is a state of overturned being. The surrender of freedom to language argues against any Manifesto that dictates freedom to the reader. A fair hearing for free expression is impossible in, for example, English. However, humanity exists til now in the exercise of the freedom to attempt freedom by all means available. Language, even the Word of God, and man is not god, is bereft of freedom, except within God, and so one must wonder whether the devotion of the person to any god is fictional. A unitary god, a single God, is as much a useful design fiction as divine function for linear man. The polytheistic pantheon is a collective extrapolation of the personal experience of a god in man. Yet man must learn to pray, and is at his best when he prays to be free. This is the prayer that gives art a divinity that can extend to the viewer a sense of self within holiness, a perceptual clue to wholeness. A universe composed of finitude is still a Power of 1.

"014Topo"
Mixed Media on Board
13 3/4" x 12"
2006
$1100

"014Topo" represents hybrid analog/digital processes, combining print, paint and plastic. The "color" of the Underpainting series is a subtle mix of metallics, glazes and tints, plus poly-media, more of a sensation than hue. "014Topo" appears in the early post-QuinRG phase. The Underpainting series was an MFA project at CGU. These selections (013+014) have never been exhibited.

In the spirit of the art that connects binary creation to the geometry of the visible universe we can discover a link to things of every kind. The urge to define is a perfunctory action preceding salvation in obliteration. The imprisonment of choice isolates the inhabited body from it habitat. The environment for choice is the universe of all choice, which is a form of freedom of imagination, which precedes formal expressive freedom, if not selfless exultation. All creation in itself is the object of joyful man. Expressively complex, people through each other and ourselves diversify the means of expression, without exhausting the remedies for experience associated with pain, such as grief. The dimensional nature of expression is formed from the connection of events to things. The thing for humanity is art, and art is dimensional. The object has dumb measurements. The thing is intelligent before it is labeled and numbered, and its intelligence is contained in the parameters of it integrated freedoms. I am free to move in my car on an American highway, only as long as I have a drivers’ license, am not transporting anything illegal, drive under the speed limit, observe traffic rules, and on, on and on. Gas is a limiting factor. The engine and other mechanical systems for operating my vehicle matter. Etc. Now, how free should I feel, in my car? Freedom of imagination, freedom of expression - am I measuring these extensions of myself? If I am, does a measurement of freedom itself reveal or explain how free I am in my existence, personal and collective? More to the point: If I were truly free, what would I imagine; and what would I express? An artist must ask these questions every day, and his art should serve to answer these questions, for today.

"'DEATH' Is a Word [Dancing]"
Charcoal, Quin. Red-Gold, Oil Pen on Redwood
17" x 15" x 2"
2004
$2100

Created during Morris Graves Studio Residency and exhibited in "Bar Codes + Rituals + Subliminal Tapes. Ballerina figure (Molly) was drawn from photo data session hosted by Beckley Dance Theatre School (2003). "DEATH is a Word" was exhibited in "Barcodes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes," in AFHG/Eureka, a program sponsored by Morris Graves Foundation, Ink People Center for the Arts and Riverwind LLC.

I watched Pork Chop Hill last night on Netflix or Amazon Prime. My Uncle Bob was a Korean War veteran, who saw combat duty in the actual field in and around the stylized scenario depicted in the film. Gregory Peck, Robert Blake, Martin Landau, George Peppard, Rip Torn, Harry Guardino, Woody Strode, Gavin McLeod, Norman Fell and others establish an ensemble that performs eloquently in a modern war movie. The image of police action in Asia set the table for movies that followed, even for recent classics, like Saving Private Ryan. This morning I am merging the rant of Chris Hedges, discussed above, and Pork Chop Hill. The memory of my relative, who received full military honors at his funeral and was quietly proud of his service toward the end of his life, colored my viewing of the movie and the Hedges’ essay. Without amplifying the statement, I will mention that in the past few weeks, two female elders in my circles of family and tribal affiliations passed away, after long, productive lives. Both women were impressive in their own ways. They lived on opposite ends of the North American continent, Jean and Jan, but they were bound invisibly. They belonged to a generation of people born a century or so ago, who witnessed radical changes in the world. The American Century is a media meme, and like every fiction, hovers over truth like the blade of a thresher. Which does nothing to diminish the reality that appeared and is disappearing with the passing of each participant. We are all moments. The moment, with few exceptions, is a thing, of which there is no such thing.

"Morris Graves' Bottle #3"
Acrylic (QR-G) on Redwood
15" x 12"
2004
$1450

During my studio residency at MGF, I was privileged to use the same bottles Graves incorporated into his iconic still life compositions. This is one of the paintings on redwood milled from dead and downed trees on the MG compound premises by Robert Yarber that was originally exhibited in "Homage" and "Barcodes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes."

One of the first vinyl records I listened to with enthusiasm, of my own volition, was Jim Croce’s Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits. “Time in a Bottle” is one of the songs that moved me as a young man, albeit one who had no real clue about the content of Croce’s musical, lyrical reflection on love, memory and time. Painting in Morris Graves studio shortly after he died, I produced a series of still life paintings, using the bottles I found in the studio, which Graves had used in his own iconic paintings. An alcoholic has specific associations with The Bottle. In a warlike Civilization every aspect of humanity is infected or at least inflected by the presence of war, unless one endeavors specifically to ban the reference in the projection. That undertaking is far less daunting that one might imagine. The appeal of Jeff Koons owes much to his ejection of war from his production and persona. I can see how some of the men and women who perceive the world, industrial relations, Civilization, historical and chronological time, material exchange, romance and sex, bodily sustenance, Nature, really all things, as facets and dimensions of interlocking warfare. Warfare is stylized conflict, and the 20th Century marked the end of war style over substance. Vietnam, the atom bomb, the trenches of WWI combined dissemble any quaint idea of war. Style requires quaint ideas, which serve the mediocrity of tyrants usually, in everything they attend but tyranny. The notional value of war was lost in its derivatives, to put it the earliest phrasing of the 21st Century.

Two Windows in a West Virginia Church"
Digital Print on Archival Paper [A/P]
13" x 19"
2000-2008
$1250

The photo data sourced for "Two Windows" was shot during pre-production for "SEAM01" in 2001. John Guider and I photographed the area around my hometown Beckley, WV, with my parents often serving as field guides. This print shows the digital processing I applied like a patina to a variety of photo series in my catalog. The original 35mm black and white photograph is scanned from the contact sheet, mechanically/digitally enlarged using my own techniques, then output on my Epson printer.

Should the destruction of realism for war be celebrated? If one is a pacifist, one has an interest in going to war with war. The tactical killing of peace is forever a pastime of the warlord, and so tit for tat. What the bigger picture reveals however is that virtuality is destroying realism across a spectrum of human endeavor. Virtual war displaces War and replaces it with a simulation, which then evolves into simulacra. The endgame is nothing. End program. The future of Singularity is intertwined with wars past. The resonance of the heroism of soldiers in battle is located in the secret embrace of lovers forever, in human time, if not universal time, which for us is unknowable, or fictional. The power to kill another person and the profound bio-synchronicity of romantic love situate as experiential nodes of man, and the fictional narrative people compose for themselves. The mashup of war and love only makes sense in a 4D, beyond binary, configuration. Within the dimensionist continuum we find other meaningful components for human life: sickness and health, birth and death, gathering and ritual, and more, throughout which we want music, poems and art in ample supply. The system of living for humans is crumbling now, and our world seems to fall apart simultaneously. Is this real life? Will virtual robber barons succeed at displacing and replacing religion, kings and queens, magic, of which the greatest is love? Will God be virtual? Will man in his dream machine forget to dream? Who will engineer this perceptual takeover? We already know who would like to, and we have seen the beginnings of virtual art, and it is heinous and ugly to the keen eye, because it is fundamentally inhuman(e).

"EVOIL"
Mixed Media and Silver Tape on Canvas
12" x 9"
2005
$975

"EVOIL" was created during my APFCW Austin production. The work was in part funded by St. Edward's University. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, campaigns, interventions, occupations - however you characterize those actions - were in full swing, and the financial crisis was just over the horizon. I explicitly integrated my political resistance to the status quo into the content of my exhibits. I did so in the Texan state capitol city (Austin), where George W. Bush had been governor, prior to his election to the US Presidency. I planted conversation-starters throughout the shows.

In Transthesis, or Notes on Dimensional Time, I commented on hara-kiri, or seppuku, in response to a Peter Drucker essay on Japanese art and society. The antique version of self-disembowelment for the Japanese died with the soldiers in the caves of Iwo Jima, who blew themselves up, instead of surrendering to Marines, who may or may not have been inclined to accept surrender under the circumstances. Now that we are all friends and allies, and the dual global-strategic menace of a China-Russia alliance absorbs the low-energy Axis of Evil, we may wish to revisit the concept of duty to the cause, and its inverse, the ritualistic suicide as mechanism of resolution for failure to successfully carry out the assigned duty. In such an end the cause is abandoned and left to the more qualified. At least the self-killing in that social organizational device is redemptive of honor. Honor is a fictional narrative in war, and love also (pertaining to coupling rights, social offense, and whatnot). At the core of the fiction is the complex binary configuration, War upon Oneself. “An Army of One” was the slogan that replaced “Be All You Can Be” and was in short order replaced by “Army Strong.” The rate of veteran suicide in the aftermath of the Army of One era is tragic. The Walter Reed Scandal during the Bush (W) administration and continuing through the Obama administration, presumably to the present, illustrates the neglect with which corrupt political elites perceive and treat the nation’s heroes. The shift to accelerated for-profit or privatized national under the fanatical neo-cons and neo-libs, since selective service was sent into political remission, has been long-term disastrous for America on many levels. The same can be said for the health care and penal systems, local to federal policing, education, sports, art and more. Business has become suicidal. The artificial personhood doesn’t care if you kill yourself. It’s only interest is in whether it makes or loses money in your demise, productivity stats aside.

"Drift #1"
Banjo, Column Base, Sand, Chain, Mixed Media Sculptural Assembly, Carved Rhino, Lead-wrapped Wood
Variable Dimensions
2019
$3400

"Drift #1" is the first in a series of temporary and permanent 4D objects. The title is co-opted from local gillnet fisher lingo, and from theory addressing multivalent socio-technological developments in the past century+, and their effects on attention, physical movement, research/analysis and more. The banjo was a gift from one of the guys at Shady Tree Studios (Austin, 2005). The carved Rhino was a gift for my son Will in Santa Fe 23 years ago.

Doing research for Post-Storage, I clicked on a link to an obituary page on a funeral home website. The actual location is Deridder, in western Louisiana, serving the residents of Beauregard Parish, not far from Texas and Lake Charles. The Myers Colonial Funeral Home and Crematorium site belongs to World Wide Web era that is dear to my heart. The shift from old to new media is most compelling on portals like Myers’, which demonstrate democratic potential in networked computing and communications. Another more recent instance I am proud to cite is The Memorial Day Foundation, whose executive director is my dear friend and coffee pal, Paul D’Elia. To upgrade memorializing our dead we can effectively, inexpensively keep databases that are easily and quickly accessible through logical forms that are excellent refinements from early versions. Many of them look pretty. Search engines are much advanced. The design options for presenting lists of image + text informatics now is practically unlimited! The croud-sourced evolution of content + context is one of the most impressive stories of the early days of personal computing, and outside specialized channels, rarely gets the deserved attention. The Attention Economy ensures this outcome. One of the features of the old web, that reveals it is still a functional ecosystem, like American democracy (both endangered) is the “Zombie” default for abandoned or neglected portals. By now I would guess there have been billions of sites built and left unattended, like graves of virtual nomads. Then there are long-sustained and therefore beloved sites like Wet Canvas, where people converge when virtual space gets too cold and lonely. Virtual Isolation in the ethereal wired world order is a soul destroyer. Survey the search engine results to find the husks of webmasters who fried and self-quarantined, never returning to their keyboards. (see Pi for a properly romantic and geekified representation of the progression ~ still fresh today).

"WOVENFORM: View from Kailea (Study)"
Ink on Acrylic [Q R-G] on Wood
4.5" x 5"
2005
$550

One of my best wovenforms. Judging from the design on the obverse, I initially created this study to use for imagining an installation. Kailea is my favorite Kauai beach. For some reason this image makes me think of whales in a pod playing.

On Kailea Beach I took my first nap as an adult. Technically, okay, that is not true. I actually napped in the passenger seat of the rental car, because I was just too paranoid to pass out in public. I videotaped late afternoon surf sessions there, featuring mostly young locals playing around on short boards. I body-whomped in all kinds of waves at Kailea. The lifeguards are absolutely outstanding. I saw them perform perfect rescues in very difficult conditions. I will always feel attraction at the thought of Kailea, which is prompted by the Name, on the obverse of my painting, and other sensations that exist in my experience, contained in my body at a cellular level, and in my memory, now facilitated by technology. Even if I can’t watch Kailea specifically, I can check out the Kauai shores through web-cams, 24/7/365. The streaming technology for surveillance is vastly improved. There are some side benefits. The same can be said for drones, for GPS. Surgical science has improved tremendously by America’s production of undeclared wars, post-911. So has extractive psychology, and logistical incarceration. Preventative criminology is a booming research and practical field, as are experiments in mass enforcement of doctrine and emotional push technology (see the Chinese Social Credit system and the Facebook scandal revealing scientific experiments on non-consenting users/subjects in 2014). At what point do we 99% demand that the thing (in this case we refer to the image falsely representing something) match its fictional text, context, subtext, and both be juxtaposed with the real thing? So people can choose between the two, and begin reforming circumstances to 4D existence and perception.

"Portrait of the Artist Bathing in Israel"
Inkjet on Archival Paper (Digital Image from 35mm Photo Data) [AP]
13" x 19" 
1984-2008
$1200

The original photograph was taken in (I think) Jerusalem or maybe Bethlehem. That's me in the tub. The digital re-treatment was applied during my MFA course at CGU, in the run-up to CONTENT at Yarger|Strauss. "Portrait" is included in one of the CONTENT portfolios.

The act of cleansing and purification is multivalent in human experience, but it is consistently present in our collective consciousness. Water, earth, air and fire are natural elements used in ceremonies for people to treat the maladies that afflict them. The ritual aspect extends the application of the healing to physical and non-physical or metaphysical aspects of our lives, both personal (private) and collective (public). The introduction of growing things to the procedure in a way enables a cleansing ceremony to remain contemporary. The sharing of prayers in a group setting can bring home the details of the troubles one faces, and facilitate the deployment of specific protocols for releasing or expelling the thing that causes disharmony, internally and/or externally. I prefer ritual communities in which no money is formally exchanged, which have no pay-to-play component, in which the leader is a trusted servant with no means to enrich him- or herself by way of the community of persons that leader serves. I love places like hot springs, ocean pools, and other special natural places for healing. Usually people have enjoyed the benefits of such places for a long time, and those benefits are widely understood, a first order common knowledge. The underpinning of the latest vestiture for the Commons is a very human urge to heal what is broken inside us. The expression of that urge does not necessarily reflect its other, natural manifestations. One shouldn’t expect the Yellow Vests to resemble a purifying Puja, except in structural, abstract analysis. Why? The cause of the malady, the disharmony, the Mouvement des gilets jaunes attempt to remedy has an artificial cause.

"Rock the Casbah (Red)" [Edition: 70/125]
Screenprint on Paper, Signed by Artist
24" x 18"

SOLD

During AFHGC, I used to visit Shepard's Gallery and shop fairly frequently. The openings and parties they threw at the Sunset location drew hordes, with long lines to get into the events. Shepard and his family plus staff were very welcoming. This was before the Obama HOPE poster and the 2008 campaign and the mess that followed. I picked up the print at the gallery. The only time it ("Rock the Casbah #70) has been out of the original tube is for the taking of this picture.

POST-STORAGE [Part 2]

In February 2019 we closed the storage units we had occupied in Upland, California, since 2006 or -7, filled a 26’ box truck with the contents, drove that vehicle through the mountain passes of Cali and Oregon in the midst of winter, and unloaded everything into our Astoria home. The POST-STORAGE essay in three parts samples the art that had been sequestered in those four containers in the Inland Empire. They (the artworks) span more than three decades of my projects and production, including samples and artifacts from Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown, the Sneaky Pete thesis series, DddD, O1, CONTENT thesis series, A Prayer for Clean Water I - V + Overflow Show, and much more. The texts cover Dimensionist theoretical territory, current affairs and the artist’s shifting perspective that arrives post-50 (almost 55). Not least in the mix is the re-contextualization of art, text and life happening in the novel (to us) Northwest Coast environment. The Astorias of Queens and Oregon are separated by the American continent. What does that distance mean, post-Internet?

"Black 01 Vinyl"
Adhesive Vinyl on Vinyl Record
9.75" in diameter
2001
$450

One of the Vinyl on Vinyl series produced for Heartless01, "Black 01 Vinyl" picked up a crack somewhere along the way. These discs referenced the amazing music recorded for our collective 01 projects in Nashville. In installations, the 01 vinyls operated visually in tandem with the environmental vinyl 01 sticker grids and other applications on objects (e.g., monitors, canvas, books, etc.) to dissolve encompassing architecture and produce new ontology for the elements in our 4D arrays, both virtual and analog, in new and traditional media.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but the art industry is only one among many industries. Artists really ought not take it personally, when our portion of the industrial topology is twisted to the whims of the super-wealthy. Our thing is being decimated and distorted, just as so many venerable disciplines, crafts and stable economies are. I am comforted by the understanding that American society is fundamentally revolutionary, and the means by which the ugly, mediocre, inhumane, tyrannical, inequitable status quo can be upended is built into our system. Historically, the strongest rebels among us fit into demographics that today are under relentless, all-directional assault. A half-century ago, the inbred, cross-eyed, soft-hand, filthy, antisocial international super-rich correctly analyzed their enemies and developed short- and long-range strategies and tactics to re-instate their domination of humanity, which was disrupted temporarily in the 20th Century.

"Jumper"
Ink and Acrylic (Quin. Red/Gold) on Museum Board
29" x 20"
2006
$1800

"Jumper" was originally presented at AFHGC, using magnets to affix the painting to the wall. The image is derived either from Century of War or Dr. McLean's Green Beret yearbook (can't remember which).

The artificial, by-design, horrific malevolent effects the 1%er beasts have unleashed upon their fellows include waves of elegantly packaged addiction, distraction, dislocation, aggression, swelling into a perfect storm of psychophrenia. The opportunism of the elites is a product of training, alliances, dehumanization and compound resources. The wealthiest can afford to test 1000 losing propositions to find the one that best serves their (the 1%) prurient, selfish and usually stupid purposes. The galling extent to which an unregulated aristocrat can induce chaos on well-organized, high-functioning community is anecdotally apparent to any analyst willing to witness the phenomenon. The Presidency of Donald Trump is a case study, but only one of hundreds. The Mayoral run of Michael Bloomberg present another instance, of a different flavor, which is true across the globe. For every Macron there is a Carlos Slim. The technocrats and plutocrats meet in Davos and Bilderberg summits, or informally wherever they like, to map the future they prefer and to shape that future with all the devices unimaginable wealth and power affords its masters. What the rest of us must recognize is that they exist by our collective permission, absent our individual capacity in most cases to counteract their synthetic will.

"RED ROVER"
Unique Digital Print Mounted on Foam Core
24" x 16"
2000
$300

This is Destination Gallery at First Union Tower interior signage for Todd Greene's "Red Rover" exhibit. I was the gallery director and liaison with TIAA-CREF and CB Richard Ellis. I also designed all marketing materials for the gallery program, which included posters, banners and invitations. Plus more. We had a great run.

What are the 4D tools that activate effective creative movement? First is convolution. The woven form in martial applications is simultaneously offensive and defensive, conducive to the sequential application of smothering combinations by a strong practitioner on her opponent. The second is complexity. Technical variation adds to the confusion of the opponent, seeking to settle into a binary mode of engagement, governed by rules that improve the players odds. The feint is a type of disrupting syncopation in percussive flurries that can be utilized, for instance, to set up decisive blows. The third is sense of duration, which expresses as endurance, or tenacity. The nature of Event determines that those who excel at conforming to the contemporary are best situated to create useful derivation. The responsiveness of the player to variations in intensity of action will be important to the outcome of any match. There are others, but the key factor to remember is the fragility of hybrid virtual and analog combinations in any 4D scenario.

"New Signal Flag"
Adhesive Vinyl on Vinyl
8" x 10"
2001
$480

The "New Signal Flag" series was originally exhibited in SEAM01 at Jerry Dale McFadden's The Attic Gallery (TAG) in Nashville. The electron microscopy elements were contributed by gallerist and collector Susan Tinney. The vinyl substrate was cut from a rejected banner swooped from one of the printers I worked with regularly.

Scalable vision is critical in 4D configurations, and the concept is formally mechanical. The visible is directional only to the viewer whose optical system is dictated by the vicissitudes of reception quality. Blur is an effect, and a symptom. When we look at the universe, do we see the universe or ourselves? The more refined one’s vision becomes, the more likely that the interpretive engine for one’s senses has created a universe of its own. The parallel consciousness of existence proposes a simultaneous continuum for the generation of stimuli and the logic of the witness. To see is to think about the seen thing, and then to feel one way or another about it. The order of unfolding interpretation places awareness in the time medium. Immediately, the alignment of content to context to consciousness commences. Absent a fourth element for synthesis, the triangulation of phenomenon with sensual focus is fictional. The synthetic features of mind and spirit as in the concept (Geistes) establishes inference as a rationalizing dynamic for harmonization in multi-valent phenomena.

"Diane"
Unique Digital Print from Photoshop Enhanced 35mm B/W Photo (Scanned Contact Sheet)
19" x 13"
2008

$1200 "Diane" was photographed in my Chestnut Square studio in Nashville in 2000 or -01. The print was output in 2008 for CONTENT, my solo exhibit at Yarger|Strauss Contemporary in Beverly Hills.

The flesh is the mediator between impression and impulse. Our physicality creates the urgency of thought, relative to the finite and infinite, our bodily nemesis, our intellectual liberator. Mortality for art is the platform for spectral expression. The organic features of time provision all manner of release. Orgasm is as real as any experience, but the motivation to experience orgasm is visual for the artist. The prejudice of the non-artist toward to art and artist arises from envy of the artistic eye in those for whom aesthetic vision remains mysterious, alien, dangerous, weird, crazy, etc. Mostly, it is a fear that is less-than 4D in its particulars, and it is bound to competition for survival, to reproduce. In short, it is the same pulsing fear that drives the !% to crush the freedom of art and artist. They (the plutocracy) as a class demonstrate a powerful collective compulsion to command and control art and culture, about which they understand practically nothing. The relations between art and the plutocrat are typical of all relations by which the super-powerful seek to define themselves, generation to generation. The 1% remain the most unfortunate subject of any artistic enterprise. Worse, their insecurity and frequent lack of character and internal or spiritual distinction condemns their portraits to history’s dumpster. Art’s canonical focus on the tyrants of the past thousand+ years (in portraiture, especially) can be described as accidental humor, as slapstick. Banksy certainly has proved this point.

"Wovenform"
Ink on Handmade Paper
9" x 11"
2008
$975

"Wovenform" was a quick sketch created in pre-production for "CONTENT" at Yarger|Strauss, initially as visual data for digital animation and still image processing. It was not exhibited in that show.

The flattening of remembrance into a disc (like a CD or DVD) is a profound recursion. Siphoning off mass vitality and locating it in a Cloud is a profound dispersion. The decoupling of virtual production from objects and privacy (as in possession) is as traumatic as the invention and subsequent convention of intellectual property. These are civic problems disguised as tech-based solutions. These are camouflaged economic redistribution policies. These are extensions of Master-Slave or -Servant programs. Weaving the facts and fictions of things into not-things is the 4D movement in a nutshell. Viewed through a Dimensionist lens, the baffling succession of frustrating failures in all but a few segments of Civilization over the past four decades are no longer baffling. Not that surety is itself the point ~ it most definitely is not. The point is accuracy, and its second point is precision, and its third point is exactitude. Beyond the three points, the rest is estimation. The elimination of ambiguity in nature is the semblance permanence.

"Pattern Print"
Digital Print on Canvas
Portfolio of 30 Unique Patterns
13" x 19"
2008
$1200

We visited Cape Disappointment today, after lunching at Captain Bob’s in Long Beach, Washington. I am bemused that at the culmination of Manifest Destiny is the Dismal Niche and Cape Disappointment. Poor Lewis and Clark, discovering so much only to find a grim end of the trail. “Ocian in view! O! the joy!” ~ Okay, maybe not all bad, but to inspect the strange history of adventure and what became of the adventurers is once more to unravel the fictions we imagine when we hear names and numbers (dates). It is the exercise (exorcism) of memoranda. Since Trump was elected President - and maybe forever - we see efforts to apply reforms to historical narratives. I think Kantian distaste is behind the urge. The art world is a flashpoint for revisionism. MoMA is embarked on quest to abolish provenance, within curatorial practice, except as it bears on the valuation of individual pieces with substantial donors attached. The market has defeated its public enemy at the pinnacle of ivory tower culture. We can look for patterns now where they are meaningless, frivolous and (con-)temporary. The anchor of non-fiction is no longer connected to the floor of the watery depths of culture. Identity is the mirror of flux, and that basic configuration will serve as the boring novelty of our visual lives. The dismantling of difference is accelerating.

"Thunder Dreamer"
Mixed Media on Canvas
12" x 12"
2006
$1800

The shock of the new is hardly shocking at all. The old is shocking. The ancient is on balance a source of fictional terror, and a resource for extraction and exploitation, especially for marketing purposes. Once this phase exhausts its momentum and all derivatives dissolve under the weight of loss of commonwealth, the orgy of present-fucking will re-commence. Art will find NOW and the happening will resume. The priceless moment will convert fashion to fusion and the simple stick and rock-based computing will relieve the pressure in Civilization. The super-rich are sensitive to the hatred of everyone else, which they misconstrue as envy. The ultra-wealthy want to be free to loathe and fear everything, anything, everyone, anyone. They hate to be rejected, despised, to be hunted and collectivized on any terms other than their own. Of course I am generalizing. This is the trick of class warfare. Because the international oligarchy consists of listed names and numbers, the member of that non-club cabal feel justified in determining cartoonish individualistic definitions of themselves. It is hopeless to ask these brats to stop making fetishes to and of themselves and the fictions they embrace to rationalize their existence, which is absolutely irrational.

"Water" + "Torture Scene"
Acrylic (Quin. Red/Gold), Copper, Die Cut Foil Print Artifact, Adhesive Print
12" x 9" (Each)
$1375 (Each)

The Secret Market series originally appeared in "A Prayer for Clean Water" at St. Edward's University in Austin. I created many small adhesive prints for the exhibit cycle. Some were affixed to and integrated into artworks, as in the Abu Ghraib "Torture Scene." Others were distributed through the presentation space, as in "Overflow Show" at Pump Project.

[VIEWS 1 & 2]

Does anyone remember the term attention span? The monopoly media have finally abandoned the bitchy refrain of condemnation toward citizens who were failing to maintain focus on important developments over time. The hypocrisy of the press is its specialty. The disappearance of freedom of the press behind paywalls under the pretense of industrial trending coincides with yellow headlines about a wall on our southern border. Respectable journalistic standards fall like bowling pins as the for-profit model serves the super-rich, corporate syndicates and the management of their affairs. Papers and news broadcasts have emerged as propaganda vehicles, even as their big stories bray incessantly about corruption of the political discourse by foreign players. What happened to Puerto Rico? Did anyone actually figure out what the reason was for the mass shooting in Las Vegas, or any of the many others? Is there a plan for resolving America’s conflicts (erm, wars, campaigns, etc.) in the Middle East? Is anyone going to condemn Israel for its outrageous border slaughters? Or Saudi Arabia’s assassination of a well-known journalist? Will anyone go to prison for Flint? Or the BP oil spill? Or the “London Whale” fiasco? Why aren’t the CEOs of the huge Wall Street banks and the Chairmen of the Fed and the Treasury appointees who crashed the economy in 2007-8 in prison? Why did Obama all the sudden decide America had to look forward, not backward. Why has justice been thrown under the bus?

"Invocations (Linda)"
Photograph (Framed)
44" x 31"
2001
$3300

"Invocations was shot in 2000 at my Belcourt (Nashville) studio, and originally exhibited at Cumberland Gallery in a summer group show. The image data from the "Linda" series was used in the feature-length animation "FALL," which was pre-produced in West Virginia in and completed during the Eureka! residency (2002-4). The inscription indicates the print is 1/25, but this print is actually unique. I really like the effect autoportrait reflection combining with the picture in my crap iPhone documentation.

It’s not that we stopped paying attention, it’s that the out-of-control corruption of America by corporate syndicates and their owners has not been punished. The shittiest of our fellows continue to get away with it. They are trotted out into the NY Times or CNN or WSJ and permitted the opportunity to congratulate themselves, once again. The situation has reached critical mass, at least in France, at least for a minute. One can only hope and pray that the mad killers among us will begin to target those who really deserve gory endings. The Coast Guard lieutenant accused of plotting mayhem is the latest in a string of incidents that suggest the lid could blow off the pot anytime. Obviously, the projection of information into media stream by the super-rich and their hacks will not include images and stories of the wealthy being murdered, maimed, convicted, poisoned, disenfranchised, thrown in the street, kicked out of all the prestigious institutions and academies to which they and their children belong, tortured, assassinated, frog-walked by cops, beaten with nightsticks on their lawns, ass-fucked in prisons by guards and inmates, stripped of all awards, and so on. These measures are off-limits, unspeakable, even as fictions that might inspire uprising and reversal of the coup, the most massive redistribution of wealth in history. Which is why we must reserve the right to imagine what we want, and share it with our fellow citizens, for the purpose of democratic, constitutionally legitimate mobilization.

"She Blew My Mind Guy"
Acrylic and Ink on Paper
30" x 22"
1998
$3400

"She Blew My Mind Guy" originally was exhibited in "The Embrace" at Third Coast Clay in Nashville. During the month-long residency at TCC I produced almost 100 ceramic paintings and the series of works on paper.

The eruption of passion is creative, if not necessarily artistic. The political embodies a specific urgency that is the mesh of the human condition and its will to commune. I’m thinking of you, Badiou! The nullification of the political leaves the desire for collective expression in a fallow state. The desertion of the demos by its representation commits the imagination to servitude of and for the ungoverned, which is not (whatever Ayn Rand might have thought) the same as the free. Fortunately we have precedence, through which we can dismiss the stupid and cynical proclamations of trolls and punks of the super-class. To assign the scale of causation with applicable value is the prime function of democracy, for all. Artists and a few other top-level free expressionists get extra protection in the democratic scheme, because we get taken out first, whenever the shitheads bust a move. You know things are gnarly when suicide is epidemic, but the times call for revolution when suicide for target demographics are encouraged, assisted and romanticized. Taking myself out is not a funny way to describe going to dinner and movie alone, in the revolutionary moment.

"Abstraction Forms Thought #4" [Written Word/Rarefied Air]
Acrylic and Ink on Wood (Framed)
14" x 11"
1995
$1600

This painting of Dim Tim, here a Cyclops in a business suit posing with his absent son, was created in 1995. The ink finish was added in 1999, when the piece was included in "Sirens + Conflagrations" at the Frist contemporary art installation spaces (stables) at Cheekwood Museum in Nashville.

I believe it is impossible to understand what is happening today in America without acknowledging the impact of the Divorce Industry on the social fabric of the nation. The USA has invisibly become a fatherless territory. The resurrection of ideologies that deserve to be dormant is one feature of the social disintegration wrought my social engineering through Family Court. The insidious influence of enforced, extraconstitutional policy adjudicated in the shadow landscape of conference rooms, mediator offices, artless courtrooms and other hideous locations is another of the unspeakable facts of American common life. The despair precipitated by the Divorce Industry is expressed in countless episodes of carnage. Family Law remedies are the worst sort, the kind that destroy the sufferer to cure her. The toxic sludge of gross institutional negligence oozing from Family Court policies and jurisdictions is consuming the conscience of our people. It weakens the population to the extent that parasitic tyrants can feast upon the still-living carcass of the Republic. The financial sector could never execute its awful encroachment into our civil society, absent the intervention of divorce practice on the soul of America.

Lanark / A Life in 4 Books, by Alisdair Gray

The smart phone is a murdered of literature and many projects of post-Church and -King free society. The novel became a liberated form through the American revolution, and despots fear it. The fatwa against Rushdie was my generation’s heads-up that the New World (GAG) Order was present and accounted for, even if it now sported checkered headware in certain regions. The top-down assault on the Arts and Humanities is always a precursor of the coup. I recently heard a recounting on radio of the Roosevelt-enabled regime change in mid-Century Iran. It is worth thinking about his views on CIA intervention in Guatamala and what is happening in Venezuela now. The public has as much chance of discovering truth in the media as it has scoring the correct ticket in the MEGA millions lottery. The armies of operatives whose primary task daily it is to shape the image of everything we consume from the information industry must be fed, and their supper is our liberty. I’m looking at you, Jeff Zucker! The evil fostered in the corporate boardrooms of media conglomerates is outperformed only in those of the corporate C-Class offices of banking and energy conglomerates. Their collective destructive power on democracy should make them Public Enemy #1, if we the people actually took seriously the legalism that these corporations are actually people. If they are people, and we accept this legal fiction, we must define them on the basis of their performance. They act criminally. Their intent is anti-democratic. Their agents are no more or less gangsters than the mobsters they fictionalize in the content with which they continuously poison our imaginations.

"Contemplation Lake"
by Tim Murphy
Oil on Canvas
10" x 8"
1995
NFS

Tim had a solo show at Destination Gallery at First Union Tower. Respect.

Another sacrifice made at the altar of consumption is contemplation. The desecration of nature is part and parcel of the scheme of the rich and powerful to destroy anything that threatens it. The planet itself is always frightening to the elite. The proliferation of unnatural practices in the field of science-enabled reproduction is a symptom of disharmony between man and his environment. The urge to bring forth new life, of course, is completely natural. In fact, there is nothing more natural. Yet the peddler of fictions Freud has had his way, post mortem, with the configuration of family. What Drucker and Hitler accomplished in the realms of private and public empire, Freud managed in the secret universe of the reproductive impulse. The nightmare of mechanical reproduction is extended from the boardroom to the battlefield to the bedroom, and if we consider Zucker and his ilk, into the imagination, the dream complex that renders our scripted, linear future from the present and past. One scene does not a parable make, except in the bitter, empty darkness of Godot. The broken promise of secular, king-less existence is that our free movement, thought, interrelations and love cannot be tolerated by the ogres, zombies and vampires of our disgusting Civilizations of origin. The international elites are leaving clawmarks in the skin of the world, as we proceed into a better life, a 4D universe, a time that is not counted in the eyes of those appointed by false gods.

"Big A Art (Wovenform)"
Ink, Graphite on Handmade Paper, Magnets, Lead-wrapped Wood
18" 12"
2006
$1800

"Big A Art (Wovenform)" was exhibited at Philip Slein Gallery in St. Louis, in a small 2007 exhibit featuring NY Artists (even though I was living and working in LA at the time). You can see by the graphite outlines where the magnets are *supposed* to be placed.

Magnetism is the special force by which the powerful encroach on the fragile armature of human decency. It is the myth of the serpent and the divine virgin, and the cuckold. From the debasement of unity by the whispers of the seducer, who paints a picture of MORE, the heart of the addict is turned. The impeachment of innocence is the aim of every pimp. The business of pimping is not only the whore, but the john and the leverage produced by the seduction of the husband. The weakest link is not the genitalia. It is the optical, as its potency meets skin. The combination is tectonic, volcanic and close to complete. Completion must achieve unity, but that is not the question here. The Inquisition is the form for our subject. Can any art progress, survive without a true conjecture for reproduction? Benjamin was as much a fraud as Sigmund Freud and his family. Fin-de-siècle Vienna and, on the whole, Austria was an incubator of malignancy, the real ground zero for the 4th Reich. The longevity of that peculiar festering dream of conquest and decadence is astonishing. The elites thrive in its putrid juice.

"Stone"
Acrylic on Canvas
12" x 9"
2004
$950

"Stone" was painted at Morris Graves' studio in Loleta, CA, during my residency. I worked from still life arrangements routinely then. "Stone" was exhibited in "Homage," at the Eureka City Hall art space.

The ritual we crave is actually a quest. The Blue Highways-style Road Trip for this generation has been cock-blocked by the super-class, who wish to reserve the power of international unregulated, free movement for themselves. Their strategies of promoting open border policies around the democratic world only has to do with generating chaos, so that their (the oligarchy) can move at will across the globe. Their money and power and reproductive potential is their passport. The emergence of the art fair, auction, exhibition and periodic festival circuit over the past half century and its codification since 911, 2001 reflect the push and pull of globalism. The tendency of the privileged elite is to overindulge the spectacular, but to do so within the banal vestiges of gutted kingdoms and churches. The 21st Century 1% mob of course must hire specialists to invent the spectacle and prevent inclusivity to the extent possible under all circumstance. Pomp and Pop are no longer distinguishable. The overall effect is camouflage. Our next Road Trip is being carved out of Tibetan mountainsides by the Chinese Revolutionary Government, whose weapons are pointed at Jackson Hole, whose agents are employed by Boeing and whose art business on paper exceeds the West.

"Two Towers"
Digital Print on Poly Material, Grommets
48" x 48"
2001
$2800

The photo data for "Two Towers" is a circa 1984 pic of the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh. This image is post-9/11 and the reference is direct, even if the actual chronology is blurry. "Two Towers" was originally exhibited at Polifilo (Nashville), in Culture01. *The wrinkles in the print are easily remedied.

If Baudrillard was right about 9/11 (and I believe he pretty much nailed it), then how exactly are we to remember the event, given that it never happened, really. I put it to you that we don’t need to remember it, and we never did, because we have art, and that is exactly what art is best at doing - remembering for us. The parsing or deconstruction of aggression against the monumental architecture of the World Trade Center, as it existed in 2001, has proved to be a fools’ errand. The cascade of idiotic reactions to that catastrophic act of violence continues. The momentum of stupidity should never be underestimated, especially when it can be exploited by clever creatures who thrive in dark worlds. Post-9/11 America still reels in the undertow of partial truth. The comparison to post-Hiroshima and -Nagasaki Japan is compelling. I would include in that comparison the knocking down of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan. If there ever was a reason to endlessly torment fanaticism in its ever-present, shifting form, the Bamiyan Buddhas’ fate defends it. The casualty of these massively violent conflagrations is learning itself. The student and the teacher are murdered by the instantaneous destruction of heroic construction. Only the extreme and radical nihilist, hater of generational transmission, rejoices at the sight of the mushroom cloud, the falling of the twin towers and the stone representation of enlightened being, of purified sentience. Whatever these structures contained, otherwise, does not sufficiently provide cause for the harm directed at our imagination.

"Mr. Gilliam"
Mixed Media on Canvas
48" x 36"
1985-6
$4200

"Mr. Gilliam" is one of the Sneaky Pete series of paintings, my undergrad art thesis. The figure is a suicide I knew in my youth. The Sneaky Petes were exhibited in the ISIS gallery and the landing outside the space in the Notre Dame art building during graduation week 1986.

The visible gives rise to conceptions for genres of violence. Language codifies violence, which one would think lessens the impact of violence, but does not. The visceral shock of violence is a sensation that activates a complex of responses, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual, not necessarily in the order. The degree to which violence affects a person over time changes with the person, and with factors to which the person is exposed. Violence can be normalized to some extent, rationalized and justified, to some extent. The strangeness of violence eclipses mindful order, or can. Discipline may be contrived to reduce the power of violence on the senses, but discipline can break, under pressure, by exhaustion, by states of mind, such as despair. Violence is not governable, even though much of civil society is devoted to the governance of violence, its definition, its redistribution, its stylization. Violence can be improved, on its own terms. It can be made directional, mastered as it were. Violence in art and dreams is an involved topic. Violence in sex and lovemaking is as common as it is perverse - it (violence) brings out the worst in a lover, over time.

* Yeah, I know the image is impaired by my reflection and the church facade. These STORAGE Series pics are starting to have a peculiar moda (style), yes? If you would prefer to see the original, DM me. In the meantime, check out this photoset of C+C documentation shot by Trey Mitchell outside Dreamworks SKG (Music Row), where we did a follow-up installation in I think 1998 or -9. We also exhibited a selection of C+C pieces at awesome, artist-friendly, post-production facility Ground Zero.

"2Gun Bullet" was first exhibited at Four Crows Gallery in Nashville in 1997. Charlotte Avant and I collaborated on the show, which was titled "COWBOYZ + COWGIRLZ." The production featured digital paintings (made in Painter and Photoshop), printed on canvas using early large format printers (Encad). Additional material was hand-painted on the printed matter. As far as I know, this was the first major artist project showcasing new digital print technology combined with traditional techniques. The 4D method is a core application, which I call "figure on abstraction." In this instance the abstract or immaterial content is all the stuff done or "created" on the computer. COWBOYZ presented layered content in themes: mythic American violence; Western heroes; the killer feminine; branding; neo-decorative elements; good versus bad guy binaries; cinematic reality versus realism; and so on. The framing and presentation was done by Ambiance in Nashville.

"2Gun Bullet"
[with Charlotte Avant]
Acrylic on Encad Inkjet on Canvas (Framed)
19" x 20"
1997

The Western as a formal construct for interpreting violence has graphic potential (see Hostiles). Of course, so few Americans work in the film business today, the orientation of almost every feature film is foreign. Is it time to push the anagram AINO? In 4D the name and number approach void, and lose meaning in the strain of distention. The dissolution of the American political class echoes the fate of the Western, even though the potential is not graphic, but metaphysical (see Vice). The surrealism of the financial sector combines the graphic and metaphysical, but as inversion, then spin (see The Big Short). The presence of English-American Bale in these films is notable, and why not mention Batman and American Psycho and American Hustle. The usage of actors in corporate movie-making is a subject I follow, as a Union Man. I admire the acting of Daniel Day Lewis, Tom Hardy, Bale, DiCaprio, but I often twitch at the Hollywood and New York City imaginary binary, and the art-hating that emanates along that binary’s meridians. Decidedly so, now that so many actors (and other entertainment world celebrities and personalities, e.g., musicians and comedians) pursue second careers as artists. I have a hard time not thinking of these rich people as dilettantes and scabs. I’m looking at you, Jim Carrey! Art will never conform to the constraints of film. The architecture of the public theater prevents this from happening, and the “home theater” is even less conducive to art. Cinematic collaboration is not comparable to artistic collaboration. Both, however, are co-operable in 4D+ media systems.

"Steers and Stripes" Tour Print
Digital Print on Poly Paper
Edition with Artist Proofs
40" x 3O"
2001
$2400

The management of Brooks & Dunn commissioned me to create digital art prints to gift the musicians, tour admins and personnel. The principals received framed large format prints and the support folks got small and medium format prints, framed and unframed. It was a big job. This print is a color proof for pre-production purposes.

The superhero hides in all the network configurations I frequent. I owe my aesthetics to comics, in the absence of daily accessibility to the world’s best art collections. Let’s freeze frame, and pay homage to the democratization of art via the World Wide Web! God bless the internet, artists! We can’t even begin to imagine the importance to future generations of the ease with which any kid with a connected device can browse the contents of museums and galleries around the world. Art will change in ways no one alive can predict. One of the only genuine contributions one make to the historical moment is percussion, the drumbeat, iterating/reiterating plus echoing/projecting the contention (objective & subjective) that art be what it is. A painting is art. A sculpture is art. The rest of what we are naming and framing as art is not art. It may be 4D, it may be really cool, it may be appreciated by the crowds the art world craves, but those art not worthy aesthetic criteria. Those are production concerns, trend markers, arts management issues, but they have nothing to do with art, which is nicely balanced between the Word and technique, which is to say, in a constant flow state supported by static form. Art is not architecture. Music is not art, it is one of the arts, and without question, a necessity for humanity. But so are racing, reproduction, eating and a bunch of other meaningful, valuable, rewarding pursuits and activities. We don’t have to call everything art, to assuage our egos, which are fictions anyway. Fake fictions, and very dumb.

"Made in USA"
Archery Target and Frame
36" x 39" x 16"
2019
$3500

I cannot recall where and when I picked up the enormous gauche frames, but they have been used in AFH exhibits since at least 2005. The used archery targets are a new find.

They Shall Not Grow Old deserves a word. The formality of heroism began its downward spiral in the trenches. I am grateful John Matthias at Notre Dame assigned the WWI soldier poets, David Jones and Wilfred Owens to one of the classes in my undergraduate course. Jones more than Owen affected me then. The war poetry of Sorley MacLean did hit me with a similar intensity. Growing up in West Virginia, in a Celtic family, veterans and their children were commonplace in our circles. I look at my Facebook friends, which mostly consist of hometown friends and acquaintances, and so many of them served in some military capacity, some with distinction. The anti-heroic narratives, tactics and strategies of the 20th and 21st centuries strike me very differently than most of my peers in the arts and humanities. The ascent of men like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the other neo-conservatives and -liberals operative in the upper regions of governments and bureaucracies, in think tanks and media, in institutions and academies, has proved disastrous for America. These chickenhawks, and their hack assets (I’m looking at you, Sean Hannity), are war criminals. They have in a few decades caused more harm to US national security than our most fervent enemies have.

"AFHGC Window Prints"
Adhesive Film, Lead-wrapped Wood
Variable Dimensions
2007
$2400

One of the final tasks we undertook at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown during the closing process was the removal of the iconic pattern window print treatments we had installed when the project commenced. I insisted we not toss the film at the time. Now, a dozen years later, the patterns, all squished together like John Chamberlain auto metal, are presented in our Backyard Sculpture Garden in Astoria, OR.

Pulling artwork out of boxes I found some small pieces from “A Prayer for Clean Water.” The one of the adhesive prints on gold fields with an O1/Barcode flip cover depicts flag-draped caskets returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. The whole sordid affair rewrites Vietnam and its media wars, ignores the saturation of European consciousness with the stench of rotting corpses. Propaganda and marketing are too intertwined technically. Bernays saw to that. I watch the bills pile up while the push mills spew bile and spittle on the microphones of our national conversation. Perhaps Bernie will throw the engines into reverse and drag our front end out of the swamp, while our asses still occupy dry land. The alternative reality and future we verge upon are to be wrought by evil deeds and men. The path of resistance is fraught with perils of every description. One wonders if there is even a place for art in the dark and smoky whirlwind of tomorrow. When I see no point to the gift of art to my fellows, who strike me as undeserving and worse, I try to bring to mind Badiou in the kitchen at Saas-Fee at the break. I asked whether Philosophy needs art now, after stating that I believe must have Philosophy today. He passionately assured me in the positive, that now more than ever, philosophy needs art.

"Skyscraper"
Gesso on Wood Construction, Lead-wrapped Wood
30" vertical x variable dimensions
1995
$3000

"Skyscraper was assembled and sprayed at Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe. The construct is fabricated from frame scraps, joined with white and wire brads.

I do not recall Badiou’s exact words. I have them written down in one of notebooks. I shall end this section with translation of Badiou (from Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil):

An immortal: this is what the worst situations that can be inflicted upon Man show him to be, in so far as he distinguishes himself within the varied and rapacious flux of life. In order to think any aspect of Man, we must begin from this principle. So if ‘rights of man’ exist, they are surely not rights of life against death, or rights of survival against misery. They are the rights of the Immortal, affirmed in their own right, or the rights of the Infinite, exercised over the contingency of suffering and death. The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man’s identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which circumstances my expose him. And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal - unpredictably, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important or secondary. In each case, subjectivation is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species, a ‘biped without feathers’, whose charms are not obvious.

[END PART TWO]

AFH UPDATE [February 2019]

We live by the mouth of the Columbia River, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. After nearly a half year in Astoria, I already notice a shift in sensibility, which seems to derive from the dynamic local environment. Saturation infuses the soul, through the near daily rains, the periodic blanketing fog banks, the often towering cloud formations, and the constant presence of water flowing past. Another wrinkle in the consciousness arises from the coming and going of commercial shipping. The big container ships, yes, but also on a different scale, the fishing and crabbing fleets operate on the awareness, calling attention to the processes of survival on the coast and by the river. Those delicious platters of fish and crustacean we devour routinely arrive through the labor of men on small craft facing tremendously dangerous conditions on the along the Oregonian shore, and the Western coastline extending south and north thousands of miles. I’ll stop here, but suffice to say the situational revelations immediately altered my aesthetics profoundly and at depth. Overall, the effects are poetic, technical, disciplinary and philosophical.

Since 2007 or -8 I have occupied storage units in the Inland Empire. I started with one to contain the important contents of Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown, my MFA thesis exhibit and solo show at Yarger|Strauss. Another unit contained mostly studio gear of every kind. Another contained mostly furniture from my student apartment and some from AFHGC. Another served as a catch-all container for all kinds of generally personal stuff, although plenty of artsy goods ended up there too. Altogether, the stash required a 26’ box truck to haul from Cali to Astoria. Over the decade+ I rented the storage units, the cost accumulated, like the dust on every exposed surface inside them: we plowed tens of thousands of dollars into them; enough to put a substantial down-payment on a home, eventually. There was also the constant badgering by the storage facility employees and management. The storage industry, I will testify, is inherently evil and cruel. In my opinion, all storage business should be either re-purposed or razed, along with the owners of said rackets. I’m looking right at you, Moishe.

This painting was first exhibited in "Tobacco Road" (ca. 1998, Nashville) and titled "Cigar Box Girl." I reworked it and re-presented it in "A Prayer for Clean Water" (ca. 2005), Austin) and re-titled it "Lust for Power."

"Lust 4 Power"
15.5" x 15"
Mixed Media on Board (Framed)
$950

There is an ongoing discourse in the globalist art world about the ethics of massive art storage complexes, like the Geneva Freeport, into which many cultural treasures disappear from public view. My narrative intersects the banal corruption of art in general by an international superclass, which is true for nearly every artist. The distortion effect imposed by the art industry’s most gluttonous players, some of whom are noxious, obsessive hoarders, is like the smoggy haze produced by a town’s dirtiest, sprawling factory. The pollution impacts everyone in the town, whether they believe, notice, comprehend why and how, or not. The primary reason I was willing to pay so much for storage for my art and our personal items, is: no one else was; and that is pretty much the bottom line. Above the bottom line, however, is a full accounting of this artist’s 4D method to insist that my aesthetic endeavors not be creatively destroyed by the horrific intellectual neglect, governance failures, commercial malpractice and social retardation afflicting this country and most others like a Biblical plague. It isn’t difficult to trace the trajectories of the world’s winners, since 2006, even if it’s hard to follow their money through all the tax havens, shell corporations, leveraged assets, currency manipulations, etc., that they employ to build enormous wealth at everyone else’s expense. It can be noted here that the Big A Art World is one prominent means by which the ludicrously rich express their power, prestige and reproductive prowess.

STORAGE #2 "Barbed Wire PJM" was first exhibited at Four Crows Gallery in Nashville in 1997. Charlotte Avant and I collaborated on the show, which was titled "COWBOYZ + COWGIRLZ." The production featured digital paintings (made in Painter and Photoshop), printed on canvas using early large format printers (Encad). Additional material was hand-painted on the printed matter. As far as I know, this was the first major artist project showcasing new digital print technology combined with traditional techniques. The 4D method is a core application, which I call "figure on abstraction." In this instance the abstract or immaterial content is all the stuff done or "created" on the computer. COWBOYZ presented layered content in themes: mythic American violence; Western heroes; the killer feminine; branding; neo-decorative elements; good versus bad guy binaries; cinematic reality versus realism; and so on. The framing and presentation was done by Ambiance in Nashville.

"Barbed Wire PJM"
[with Charlotte Avant]
Acrylic on Encad Inkjet on Canvas (Framed)
20" x 21"
1997
$1800

You know, sometimes it appears that the bad guys are winning. Appearances, so it goes, can be deceiving, and words are always fictional. The universal law, however, assures us that the good guys always win, eventually. Which probably is not a great comfort when a villain is about to blow your face off with a Colt .45. Since Y2K or so, I have operated on the notion that a quarter of my artistic efforts need be devoted to archiving my production. The impetus for that idea derives from awful, hard experience. When hard drives die, when art is damaged, destroyed or lost, when you lose track of a collector, the void in the catalog can cause an psychic ache that may or may not be ameliorated by a meditation session, massage, affirmation, etc. The subtext of all Western art is waste, which is the Civilization’s Ur product. Waste is the relentless undercurrent of cultural production and artist mythology. Getting wasted is the non-artistic expression of creative (self-)destruction. That the two forces (art and getting wasted) combine in the romantic, imaginary artist mythos should hardly be surprising to anyone. The awful consequence of the valorization of gross waste in art life is played out generation after generation. The massive current crop of ODs and suicides in significant portions of the population ought to make the gods of the beauteous, artsy West blissful. It also is worth noting that the demographics of early demise suggest an intentional undermining of resistance against the wholesale co-optation of society by the Superclasses.

"Army Joe"
70"h x variable dimensions
Life-sized Figurine
$1200

"Army Joe" initially appeared in my CGU installation "7 Episodes" and later in an AFH Gallery Chinatown (ersatz or untitled) exhibit during the opening weekend of the Murikami show at MoCA. I bought him at an Inland Empire army surplus store. As far as I can tell, this figure is no longer in production. He is made I think using a foam injection mold, is not too heavy and will spook you if you forgot he was hanging out in the corner there.

My career plans have in large measure been hampered by 20 years of America at war, the Crash of 2007, the lack of justice for the bastards behind both disasters, and the ongoing political, economic, military and social cataclysm that is more or less a status quo now. Nonetheless, I have done whatever I can do to keep the faith. I realize that planetary events are nothing to take personally. For crying out loud, at least my species is not extinct! Yet! I could frame this segment differently, through a lens of personal responsibility, which is where the logic becomes complex. A contemporary artist, according to the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, will need to fund her labor in one of these ways: sales; family support; public support; a day job. Over a lifetime, many artists will rely on any and/or all of those types of art funding, often combining them. If I attack the private patronage art industry for its over-reliance on the wealthiest patrons, obviously I will have damaged my attractiveness as a collectible artist. If I attack the public art system for its poor management and corrupt policies, that will not endear me to the agents in that network. If I alienate my family, how could I rationally expect them to desire my art for their homes? If I am true artist, I am likely unemployable in a great proportion of commercial concerns, whose practical ethics contradict my democratic aesthetics of freedom, of liberty. I’m looking at you, Bill Gates/Microsoft.

"American Artist"
48" x 36"
Mixed media on canvas
1985-6 (Text added 2005)
$4400

I originally exhibited "American Artist" in my undergrad pop-up Isis Gallery senior show at Notre Dame in 1986. The last time I showed it (with added text) was in "A Prayer for Clean Water" in Austin, Texas at St. Edward's University.

During the past eight years of doctoral production, but especially between 2015 and the present, post-Occupy, post-Bernie, post-Standing Rock, in the middle of the Yellow Vest uprising, I have engaged art on a basis that diverges from the arc of the half century or so prior. Sorting through the contents of those four storage units, I can reacquaint myself with the conflicts of my life. The thousands of items in these boxes, tubes, bins and blankets possess meaning, for me if no one else. The struggles of art life are here, but so are the moments of celebration. Anonymity and celebrity present a binary form. Memory is the medium within which all the ideas and experiences circulate, as one gazes from this moment into moments past. It is the challenge of integration to uncover the continuum existing in the objects. An exhibition can serve the community or collective memory by linking the objective to continuity in the instance of sharing. When things are remitted to a hiding place, a kind of cage, a quarantine, whatever the justification, the natural order is disturbed. This is why prisons-for-profit are a heinous, hellish phenomenon. People are not things to be dropped down a hole and sealed off from us, and certainly ought never be commodified in and through imprisonment. The repercussions on society are incalculable and severe.

"Love's Gotta Gun"
Mixed Media (Painted Frame with Silver Tape and Adhesive Prints)
15.5" x 11.5"
1997-2006
$950

One of the original COWBOYZ + COWGIRLZ "Love's Gotta Gun" series first exhibited at Four Crows Gallery, later at Dreamworks SKG (Nashville). Additional layers and materials added for "A Prayer for Clean Water" cycle of exhibits in Austin. This piece was installed at Pump Project for "Overflow Show."

No one likes to lose all the time. It should not happen in fair game play. Why not blow the whistle on cheaters? Why not call out the ones who are sucking the fun out of the contest? A citizen can risk everything in the current scheme, by contradicting a pundit like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, or taking a position against the surveillance state, or pointing out the very real harm caused by unaccountable entities like the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum. When the monopoly media push fiction at the masses, a mass response is logical. The problem with that logic is simplicity. Causation in a 4D reality does not conform to 3D or 2D logic. There is no point there. The finality of punishment is subverted by the complexity of integrated virtual and actual platforms. The materializing reaction will not meet the immaterial cause. There will be no satisfaction of the desire for restoration of harmony. We must recognize that those who are winning currently are effectively adapting to 4D circumstances and suppressing the capacity of others to do likewise. It is rocket science.

"DEATH [Fragment]"
Charcoal, Quin. Red/Gold, Stencil on Redwood Block
13.5" x 10.5" x 2"
2004
$1400

Created during Morris Graves Studio Residency and exhibited in "Bar Codes + Rituals + Subliminal Tapes. Ballerina figure (Molly) was drawn from photo data session hosted by Beckley Dance Theatre School (2003).

The metaphysical nature of perception does not prevent mortality. A concept is not a workaround for the end of awareness, as a function of embodiment. Art is a festival for the body. To sustain the child’s pose into an adult state permits expressive humanity in a context of holistic responsibility. The heft of our inter-generational commitment is mighty, but art releases our collective and one’s individual spirit to the task of sustaining vision over time. As an American citizen, I wish to participate in the programmatic orientation to a national vision for the future, one that fosters harmonious relationships among our internal and external kinfolk. President Trump won the 2016 election by falsely promising to undertake that enterprise. President Obama twice betrayed that cause, in actions and failures to act great and small. The course of this nation, in our emergent 4D universe, is being erased as the planet spins in space and time. Everything matters, and I, for One, refused to allow my creative life to be auctioned away for pennies on the Dollar, or tossed into a landfill. My world is not garbage.

"Glow-in-the-Dark 01 Monitor"
Vinyl Sticker, Acrylic, Apple Monitor, Lead-wrapped Wood Base
12" x 15" x 14"
2000
$2100

Originally exhibited in "Heartless01" exhibit cycle in Nashville at J&J's Market & Cafe, an alternative art space at that time.

Can vision be toxic or radioactive? Attaching these terms to interpersonal relations is a tactic that must be critiqued. Vision assists our social sensation, as it assists our physical senses. The world you see is mediated by the body first. Now we must contend with an external media that would usurp our trust in what optics assure us is factual. The media runs scripts that are highly processed, like Cheese Whiz, that produce channel-clogging gunk for the mind and spirit, as Hegel conceived them. The stupidity we encounter is a product of intent, as bad design. Malfunction is a utility whose output is waste. Obsolescence is the poetic misconception of the professional wastrel. No sound and sane human arrives at the new day with the dream of wasting time, creating wasteful things, laboring in the service of waste. Nor does the sound and sane human arrive at the new day with dream of excess everything or anything. Sane and sound people desire enough, that is all. Toxicity and radioactivity exist in dimensions of human awareness that long ago forgot the meaning of enough.

"Vision Channel Device 1 + 2"
Vinyl on Pigmented Acrylic
Lead-wrapped Wood Base
48" x 48" x2 (Adjustable Angle)
2000
$4000

These panels were originally exhibited in the DddD Collective exhibition "Inside><Outside" at the Parthenon in Nashville. They have been re-applied in AFH scenarios, projects and expos ever since. Most recently the red VCD was installed at AFH Gallery Chinatown as a kind of signage.

[View 1]

No contraption, no widget will be adequate to encourage a person to reformat the drive upon which her existence is rigged. It is not a proposition for machinery. No great cure, no wonder pill will fulfill the human prospect of freedom. Looking at you, Sacklers! Art is an agent for radical transformation, but its potential is rarely met. The miraculous is a media target. The intellectual bias and prejudice against the manifestation of vision is a known quantity. Yet the rebellion against such blatant disregard for normal humanity fails. Why? Because the mass production of ignorance and poor perception is patently successful. Because the winners will stop at nothing to win. Because whatever enemy they perceive, they will cruelly assault, and they are elite in the art of unspeakable behavior. They are fantastic at mediocrity. They are amazingly proficient at banality. The excel at anarchy, when democracy threatens their power, money or sexual gratification. No crime is beyond them. The mock the Apocalypse, in the interest of their own advantage.

[View 2]

Not long ago, they conducted their affairs in secret chambers, with strange rituals and enforced codes of conduct. Now, the Other is a boilerplate, and the world’s most powerful and richest people seem to have lost their tremors at the mob. The status quo will not last. Appetites for conquest, demands for conversion and obeisance will continue to swell among the global oligarchy. Art will reflect this development. The patterns of the image will achieve congruence with the time, and space will mold itself to that form. Personhood will be visible as an impression of the urgency of irrepressible excess. No patina will be too lavish. No expenditure will be enough. No art will restrict the necessity of domination. No territory will be immune to the demand for supply. The market must abound. The return on investment must grow. The accounts must burgeon. The collection must expand. The security must be impeccable. The style will underwrite the establishment of order. No deviation will be permitted. No dissent will be tolerated.

"John K's Buckets & Mop"
Tar, Buckets, Mop, Lead-wrapped Wood Base
75" x 15" x 30"
2006
$2500

First deployed in Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown experimental 4D installation series that included "MFA Project (Installation Array 1)," "Super Lucky Masters of War," "You Can't Buy Any of This," "You Just Gotta Believe!!!" "Everyone Is Not an Artist," "Ideas Aren't Art," "LULA #2: Super Lucky Moons," "RE-FUSED" and more.

In the extremity of polarization, the hunger for a measure of humility will abide among the poor. The mode of healing for the grossly intolerant super-wealthy and -powerful will prove ostentatious but empty. Little care will be taken to ensure the safety of the young and old, unless the factory construct adheres. This is the neo-Darwinian dystopia of the unresolved future. The predictions of violent upheaval and menace by doom will fade into the burdens of mundane chores. Every step will become heavier than the last one. Each breath fainter than the previous one. Hands will reach for comfort and receive addiction. Buttery lust will be drained of potency, until all that remains of seduction is its tension. The repulsive will advance from there. We can already see the notations. Being famous is no longer a temporary fix. Fame is the mirage we all thought it would be, when our friends began to drown in it. The oasis hid a graveyard of needy youth, disguised as businessmen in suits. Only the sludge in the pits of their infinite despair drew the fat vultures’ attention.

"REFUGEE"
Charcoal, Acrylic (Quin. Red/Gold) on Board
17" x 13.5"
2002
$1200

One of the "Century of War" paintings, only exhibited at Elena Graves' Brentwood Manse in a private home show in (I think) 2002.

As my Tarahumara friend Rudy, the White Buffalo, used to say, “We’re all refugees, now.” The storage industrial complex is a sign of the times. Media like Storage Wars glamorize the predatory and consumptive in our society. Abandonment is a facet of the schism of property and place for the uprooted. The pretense that looting is a worthy vocation or fun and rewarding hobby is horrid. The debasement of the social contract is almost total. After all, once torture and assassination are acceptable, what is unacceptable? The bond between a person and her worldly goods is shadowy at best, because no respect is reserved for the synthesis of things and people. The cyborg is the cliche, the superhero is the icon and the fellow in front of you at the grocery store is less real than the date you’re trying to make in Tinder on your mobile device. Sex robots are evidently here to stay, for those who can afford them. Meanwhile, the extension of the virtual has unfettered HOME from its own causation. The domestic is a casualty of endless war and growth.

"New X Pattern 1 (Vertical)"
Acrylic on Wood
86" x 2"
1995
$1250

My original concept for these had to do with dissolving the hard 90 degree corners in white cube rooms. Also the color sequences inferred combinations with other interior art and design elements. I built these and the others of the series from scraps of framing materials at Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe, where I worked at the time.

We must reconsider the idea of the infinite vertical. The fantasy of unlimited growth is as stricken as the fantasy that government, art, romance or anything worthwhile should run more like business. POTUS Trump ought to by example have abolished the fakery of almighty markets once and for all. We can see that our basic network of systems is rigged against anyone who is not outlandishly wealthy, connected and powerful. Reproduction is connectivity power. The human/technological mesh of layered communications means that total democracy is possible. That five monopoly corporations dominate web traffic, is an intolerable affront to free society. Technological reproduction is as much a human right as sexual reproduction. Free reproduction is equal in value to free speech and a free press to liberated society. Assigning governance roles via policy (see FCC, net neutrality) assures the immolation of democratic concourse. The world is not only vertical. It is, as we have known for hundreds of years at least, spherical, and therefore fundamentally all-directional, and infinite by measure. Business never made this world or our life in it. Business is another word for leech.

"Red 01 Bar Code"
Die Cut Foil Print on Metallum
20" x 20" (Framed)
2004
$2400

Originally exhibited in "Bar Codes + Rituals + Subliminal Tapes" in Eureka, CA. The Metallum substrate was made available to me by its manufacturer, Riverwind, LLC, where I did an artist residency and tested the unique pressed-metal paper-like material for artist applications. Times printing, owned by the Strope family for four generations and serving the Humboldt community since 1854, produced the die cut foil print and affixed it to the Metallum. "Red 01 Bar Code" is an artist proof.

In Elephant Man, the Joseph Merrick character played by John Hurt poignantly says, “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!” The crux of the human condition now is the presumption of inhumanity. Business insists man is a commodity, an extension of the slave-based model of colonial society. I can shout “I am not a bar code,” but the cashier will understand the resonance of this manifesto statement as much as she would understand if I shouted, “I am not an elephant.” Because the business depends upon my conformity to its complex, ubiquitous, pervasive system, networks of systems and syndicates. I must be compelled to synthesize with the worknet, or… the glitch could cause a system crash. At least that is the anxiety resistance produces in those for whom co-optation is the daily rigor. To observe a fully integrated system operative glitch in the face of confrontation, conflict or rebellion is to begin to assess the damage from hive mind on a normal person. The tragedy of the age is the extent to which people have been converted to mechanisms for their own dehumanization, a process rooted in compliance protocols.

"Desert Waterfall"
Frame Fragments, Sand, Column Base, Lead-wrapped Wood
24" x 24" x 16"
1995
$2650

This construction is composed of elements that come from several phases. The acrylic-painted wood "waterfall" is created from goldleaf art framer scraps, assembled with white glue and nail gun. I can't recall where I found the column base, but I've been using it in studio practice and installations since at least the late '90s. I scored the lead-wrapped wood platforms in Austin in 2005. They had been used for industrial glass and ceramic production. The sand we gathered in Cannon Beach today.

The sensation of falling down is medicine for the lie of the endless vertical. The non-scientific idea of gravity, conjoined with the scientific definition, synthesize to humble form in practice. The convolution of natural material elements with our most humble perceptions (e.g., of light and shadow) produce without obvious effort substantial innovation. The fear of falling is valuable to the sentient locomotive, because it heightens consciousness of curved paths. One of my favorite highway sign graphics is the truck tipping over. The implication is the driver enters the curve too fast and the truck rolls. Planting a structure in the earth is facilitated by the engineer. I once knew a man who repaired radio towers, sometimes on the top of skyscrapers. He had nightmares that he would drop a wrench, which by the time it reached the ground, might as well have been a missile shot from a cannon.

"01 Monitor (NASA)"
Monitor, Adhesive Vinyl, Lead-wrapped Wood
30" x 18" x 19"
2000
$2100

The NASA monitor was a gift from my friend and original DddD collective artist and scientist Chip Cox. For the "Heartless01" sequence of exhibits and projects, I added the 01 sticker. I've always loved how that black 01 works on the green-gray screen of that monitor.

On the drive north through the I-5 corridor of California and Oregon, I witnessed a ghastly tragedy. One of the most fertile landscapes on the planet has gone fallow. A reader interested in the history of the region, specifically the chronicling of water rights battles, might start with a book like Cadillac Desert, by Mark Reisner. My emotions at the scale of the debacle ranged from fury to stupefaction. Whether one knows about the situation, or the unfolding revolution in France, or the LIBOR scandal, or the Panama Papers, or…is a function of media working for the sustainably reproductive rich and powerful as it was designed to do, and failing everyone else. Or rather…is a function of media converting mass populations into resources for extraction and exploitation schemes to serve the wealthiest individuals and families in the world. The immaterial industry correlates to the material industry dimensionally. The war between Amazon and Wal*Mart is a key point of convergence or intersection in the duel. The analog of brick and mortar-based production, including manufacture and delivery networks, corresponds, is a flip side to the new media topology for data, an immaterial goldmine for a host of extractors and exploiters, in the private, government and military sectors. While new Dust Bowls evolve, the forever “New” Economy emerges, continuously.

"MacLean Warrior"
Acrylic on Wood
24" x 7"
1995
$850

One of the Headstone Series, inspired by the carved capstones of clan burial sites in Scotland on Iona and elsewhere in the Highlands and Islands. This piece initially was exhibited in "Where My Feet Stick to the Ground" in Nashville at the Peanut Gallery.

I am not a meteorologist, but that doesn’t prevent me from entertaining crackpot conceptions about the climate. I am not unequipped to analyze chaotic phenomena in large and small systems. I am accomplished at spotting the source of turmoil in a complex organization for production. If the dysfunction is intentional, then the agent of dysfunction will often camouflage their contribution to the disruption, for myriad purposes, one of the primary ones being accountability avoidance. When one drives 19 hours in any direction on American Highways, one is presented a window into the state of the Union, which is regional. America is a 50-state republic, divided further into smaller territories, in order to enable bottom-to-top democracy, local to federal. The current global climate narrative displaces a national discourse needed immediately on the viability of our form of government. We must ask ourselves whether our country is still a functional free federation of states and smaller provisional governments, reducing to the size of dispersed villages. After the 2016 election, and the role of the Democratic Party in rigging the primaries, the question is no longer moot. Bernie just announced he will run again, presumably as a Democrat. Speaking for myself, after the truth of 2016 came out, I concluded I can never in good conscience as a free man vote Democrat again, unless the party makes amends and fixes its fixes.

"Half-moon Form Pile"
Ink on Museum Board
40" x 30"
2006
$1200

This ink painting was created with digital animation in mind. The form is inspired by Joshua Tree "rock piles." The half-moon shape is applied in the spirit of Ab-Ex, but subverts that reference as a paint-pattern. The museum board was a gift of the Sam Francis Estate.

In a 4D system, the composition armature can be constructed utilizing a single form. The pattern is not defined by identical attributes. It is described by modification of the impression, and achieved through spatial displacement. The inspiration for the practice is time itself. A single, consistent entity can be many things within the context of duration. The meaning of this statement derives from an openness to the artifacts of existence, which include trails, scratches, indentations, weathering, blur, scuffs, and a host of interesting accidents. Variation is the signature of the hand-made shape. The ineptly titled Artificial Intelligence imaginary can only simulate the truth of real making. It is the Achilles Heel of AI, that machine intelligence is still coupled to mathematical perfection, to the balanced equation, to harmonized final outcomes. The recent seriously ugly AI art is a testimony to the mismatch of expectations written into the code of virtual humanity. If the reader is motivated to study computer-enabled art practice, peek at the projects of Joseph Nechvatal. If I have an issue with the language of my friend Joseph’s virtuosity, it is in his own reassignment of analog terminology to paint a portrait of his (Nechvatal’s) creation. It is to my mind an unnecessary move. Joseph’s work stands on its singular merits, and the progressive accomplishment throughout is remarkable in its own terms.

"Pixel Painting"
Acrylic on Cut Canvas
10" x 8"
2007
$950

The Pixel Painting series is my answer to the technical question the so-called Minimal artists proposed regarding an interstices between 2D and 3D artist practice, and object specificity. I worked on the Pixel Paintings during my MFA program at CGU, but the real solution for the proposition above I found in the Topos series of 4D VyNIL. The Pixel Paintings are the substrates for the Topos Paintings. The raised paint effect is created using heavy body Golden acrylics, pressed between similar surfaces, then carefully separated. My CGU MFA peer Quinton Bemiller has done a lot with this technique.

The 4D artist, at least for now, must manage the archive of her own production. The archival project is an intervention, a preventative technique that subverts the command and control mechanisms that undermine artistic freedom. The code, narrative or language of definition is the means by which the artist is enslaved. The numerical for valuation is the means by which the art is relegated to the overarching property regime. The cost-benefit analysis is the nemesis of aesthetics. A 4D archive for art begins with the inventory of objects and continues infinitely with the immaterial content and context those archived objects generate. The educational prospectus for each 4D artist archive coincides simultaneously with all others. The conceptual image of the program for a 4D catalog of created things necessitates the reconsidering of scarcity as the baseline model for art. Art no longer is limited by the perception of physicality attaching to property. Neither is art merely idea, or reducible to code.

"Regional Standard Arts Project (RSAP) Door Sign"
Acrylic, Ink, Rub-on Text on Board
19" x 17"
1993
$1800

When I founded RSAP, it was the only artist cooperative gallery in Santa Fe, in a field of over 200 retail art spaces. The door sign was (obviously) handmade, and not crafty, really. The high professional standards of the Santa Fe art market were a foil for our project. The artists named on the sign were the finalists, after 18 months of refining our mission and vision. RSAP was located in the beautiful Pueblo Deco depot in the Santa Fe Railyard. Some of these artists, like Robert Ash and Melinda Morrison, had their pro experiences showing at RSAP. It was a remarkable undertaking.

The self-evident aspect in art is fiction. To empty art-filled storage units into a truck and haul the load cross-country and unload it into a home is to confront the volumetric quality of art, in the class Things. The 1%er artist today hires a factory to enlist production crews to manifest concept-to-object, Hegelian art. The Everyone-Is-an-Artist fiction has become a business model for talentless, craftless, clever con artists. The philosophy of objectivity justifies the excesses of Hirst, Koons, Ai Wei Wei, Koons and the rest of the roster of A-List art pros. The art fairs obliterate the model of artistic self-sufficiency that is half of the core of American democracy. The other half is the capacity for vertical integration of the collective, and the process by which self and collective are harmonized in the medium of balanced interest. The success of the American model can be compared to a major league batting average in baseball, right? For those who get the reference, our assessments jigger on the fly a relative, metaphorical approximation of success as ratio to failure in the shadow system of history: to wit, America’s founder aspirations; and our contemporary ones. The idiotic “more like a business” doctrine must be replaced by “more like a baseball game.” See Bull Durham or even Slap Shot, by God, for amplification.

"Leslie"
Ink, Acrylic on Paper
48" x 24"
2004
$2800 "Leslie" was created during my Morris Graves studio residency (Loleta, CA). The image was derived from a photo of the model by Trey Mitchell, during the pre-production phase of "INSIDE><OUTSIDE" in Nashville. Leslie was pregnant at the time of the shoot. The painting is composed on paper provide from Graves' own stash, and the colorful Dr. Ph. Martin inks I used were also Graves'. "Leslie" was first exhibited in "Barcodes + Rituals + Subliminal Tapes," and later in "Overflow Show" at Pump Project in Austin.

The malaise short-term ROI-influenced ideation crushes the alignment of production and value over time. Both production and value are time-based (4D). Art is too. These three elements (production, value, art) combine to establish what we loosely call contemporary art. The schism for art promoted in this flawed, insufficient configuration appears when the product and its evaluation conflated with art, in the medium of the fungible. Money is imagined to be fungible. Art is not money (looking at you, dead Andy Warhol). If fungibility links to the deadline and the third dynamic in the triangulation is coercion, for the objective (art included), then you have a thoroughly unethical economics of artificially induced desperation. The storage industry operates on this basis, as does the US Government over the past decade and under the current administration. The human coast of this anti-democratic method of governance is practically immeasurable. It is the recipe for addiction, particularly when set in an environment of ludicrous waste and excess for the “winners” or “owners.” The despicable use of language by the super-rich and their minions to devalue the demos (“takers,” “deplorables,” “have-nots,” etc.) is evokes the exclamations of tyrants throughout human history.

"Barcode 01 Funkshunart T"
Silkscreen on Hanes 2XL White Tee Shirt
Variable Dimensions
2004
$240

During the "Eureka!" Ink People Center for the Arts-hosted residency, Shane Kennedy and I undertook a number of small or single-run art multiple projects. One of those yielded a set of Funkshunart (wearable art) tee shirts. I don't recall who our printer collaborators were on this. The finished clothing was included in the exhibit "Bar Codes + Rituals + Subliminal Tapes." NOTE: The shirt will be dry cleaned and pressed before it is shipped to a purchaser.

Upon review, my art since the 1980s is uncompromising in the things that matter to me most. I am confident that it can “hold its ground” with any artist’s production over the same timeline. The body of work is technically diverse, embodies a breadth of aesthetic prospects, aptly embodies the dynamism of the age (analog + virtual), progresses logically, and more. I am proud of my art. An artist who is critic of his own material may or may not be like the lawyer representing himself. The feeling to which I refer has nothing to do with representation in a court of law. The pride I feel is a survivalist pride, which is predictably bittersweet. Surviving as an artist frequently has nothing at all to do with the art itself. The conflation of artistry and art as a profession is fictional. Art makes love and business fucks for money. It’s as simple and dumb as that. When economy catapults into a 4th dimension for art then we will learn what is possible for art (and humanity) over the next millennia. Keeping in mind that mankind has some key problems to resolve within the same bundle.

"...Custody Evaluation"
Acrylic and Ink on Masonite
18" x 24"
1995

$2700 "...Custody Evaluation" was originally exhibited in Eidolon Gallery in Santa Fe in a show titled "The Divorce Industry." Every time I see the few remaining pieces of the series is like peeling a scab, re-opening a wound. "Divorce Industry" was my first professional solo exhibit in a retail gallery.

The fracture of the universe into building blocks for human knowledge is an obsolete, less than 4D precept. That concept of accumulation is suffocated by the virtual. The Fordist economy is on the verge of extinction, as Elon Musk is discovering. One-size (dimension) will not fit all. No amount of smashing the square peg makes it round, which is the lesson of Afghanistan. The manufacture of failure is the secret to diet industry success. It is the secret of modern Capitalism, when the ledger balances in favor of the tiny fraction of those who win and against those losing majorities. Capitalism is not an ideology, or a science, or an art. It is a design fiction, a misrepresentation sustained as a project with a specific goal. No amount of philanthropy restores the good in Capitalism, which is amoral or evil in itself. I’m looking at you, Eli and Edythe Broad! A new art world is possible, to paraphrase the Illuminator, and it must be devoid of Broad and his ilk. The marriage of art and science in 4D cannot succeed without the bringing to heel of the financial sector. Technology is ultimately worthless, if its primary function is to make Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Schmidt and the rest of the geek-i-garchs unimaginably rich and powerful.

[END PART ONE]

AFH UPDATE [January 2019]

Over the weekend while I was working on various Matterhorn Project items, I saw a notification that informed me that Flickr was uploading photos from my iPhone. The mobile was not plugged in to the iMac, which is connected to the web. Flickr windows were opened. WTF. I don’t like being hacked. It turned out that the culprit was the Flickr Uploadr app I’d downloaded in a half-assed way a couple of weekends ago. I thought it hadn’t worked for some reason, and used the old tool to add some photos to the AFH Flickr portal. Anyway, it’s 2019 and the web is automated in ways that were inconceivable in, say, 1995. I’ve decided for the moment to take a laid back approach to the situation, partly because the images that Flickr made an album with (all by its automated “self”) are ones that I want to reconsider. Let’s call it a happy accident. I thought I was finished reviewing my time in NYC (and Oxford, etc.), but the catalog the Uploadr threw back in my face & forefronted the past several years (1/2016-19) in my mind, whether I wanted it to or not. Emotionally, my response is a mixed bag, containing low lows and good times, and a bunch of life moments that hardly feel real anymore.

“Empty Pocket Cyclops Cowhand,” Bushwick Open Studios group show (2014)

You know, dear reader, that AFH Flickr archive has had over 660,000 views, since we went live in 2006. Those numbers are nuts! Some social media/consumer portable culture icons get those numbers for a single post nowadays, I know. But in the mid-Oughts that sort of massive interactivity with images put the world on notice that an individual, any individual, could effectively compete with media giants for the eyes and attention of users the world over. We designed an AFH platform that had multiple access points and lots of connectivity. The array featured a nice balance of original content, project documentation, theory, critical discourse, cultural/political/economic analysis and more. We reached a lot of folks, proved the 4D model (analog>virtual<>analog>virtual) and, best of all, a lot of the time it was fun as hell. We worked with a lot of very cool people. A bunch of them are doing great work right this minute. I’ll turn 55 next month, and am discovering that Rudy White Buffalo was steering me straight. “You spend the first 50 years experimenting and the second 50 assimilating,” he said, with a big grin. “After that first 100, if you get that far, you’ll be a real human being.” Those Tarahumaras used to lived hundreds of years, Rudy claimed.

Fletcher Liegerot performing in "Artist Zoo" > Arts in Bushwick/Bushwick Open Studios (2014) in AFHstudioBK

Shane lent me The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker to read. I like it. I trained with poets at the University of Notre Dame, including John Matthias and Goran Printz-Pahlson. I’ve been to quite a few readings over the years, and done a few myself. Poetry seems an odd activity to revisit in these hard times. The same can be said of any artistic enterprise. Of course the opposite is true: poetry, dance, art, music, theater and so on - the humanities, the juicy creative stuff - these are best things to do, when it appears we all are on the verge of war, or awawr. The US government is shut down over a wall proposed for the Mexican border. The economy is teetering at the edge of recession. China and America are maneuvering through the first salvos of a trade war, which hotheads suggest could shift into the real kind. The “wars/rumors of war” churn is in ON mode. Russia, Iran, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Taiwan. A little spark is all that is needed to start a YUGE conflagration. Cross fingers. The weather is mystifying and terrifying, with glaciers melting, forests blazing, droughts, etc. Meanwhile, the SuperRich gather at Davos to fret about Inequality, as they did last year, but if you crunch the numbers the message does not conform to the massage. The Yellow Vests are taking it to the next level. The lies are losing their luster.

"IN GOD WE TRUST" (Bushwick - Livin' the Dream!) ~ October, 2014

An artist in the USA is a citizen, first. Whatever one’s occupation or non-occupation, in a democracy, this is the case. The subterfuge of democracy is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, programmatically applied over time to some degree, but also arising from a myriad of conditions, forces, dynamics and circumstance. More than ever before, humanity is equipped to address anti-democracy at most any level. So then, why is no adequate defense of representative, republican government visible? Which is not to question the consistent appearance of resistance ~ it is ever present, and a menace, a source of trepidation to those who demand the co-optation, or even extinction of free society. The ghost of rebellion haunts these individuals, their concourse, their decadence, their syndicates. It is the horrible logic driving their hiring of private armies, their expressions of dismay, public and private, their accidental slippages in which they demonstrate disdain, hatred and loathing for those they worry threaten or despise them and their false status and pride. These parasites and predators, these sociopaths, know deeply their existence itself is an abomination. I will not accept their patronage. This position has cost me tremendously over the decades. I refuse that form of slavery, because it extends directly to their ideas about "collecting.” To these oligarchs and their minions, the art object is an object of consumption, a wily theft from the public domain, a slave bought and sold at auction, something that - like everything - has a price, the means by which they dictate value, a court joke, a key to separating culture from the commonwealth, a sign of power, wealth and reproduction. Like them, their affliction unto art is an abomination. They would we be doomed, as they are, bereft of Spirit, shadow creatures with numbers and names attaching. Their days are numbered and their names will be forgotten, and thereby erased for all time.

Signs of Movement, NYC (2014)

The templates for community action are only inert, in themselves. Only when people apply them, utilize them, is their value realized. Time-based performance is a means by which such models become catalysts for collective behavior and organization. The presence of noise (music), food (sustenance), touch (dance) and so on, in formal context with overlays of both power and control plus release and freedom ~ the recipe for fiestas pretty much seems hard-wired into the human experience. The phenomenon of the block party for instance is practice for mobilization (for emergency, for war), as much as it is an outpouring of shared culture or belief or sensation. Decoupling the praxis from its awful iterations (e.g., lynching) and reassigning it to free, democratic purposes (secular, not to honor kings either), that is a task for the 4D generation.

Giglio in the Morning, Williamsburg, BK (2014)

One binary that necessarily must be disposed of promptly is “living within one’s means” versus “meaning in one’s life.” This superimposed pragmatism is a moralism inflicted by the rich on the poor. Now that being unimaginably wealthy is a joy a few people know, and impoverishment is the mundane reality of billions of people, the austerity for the serf class program deserves a toss in the rubbish bin, along with those monsters who peer down from their rooks at the masses and launch pithy missiles at the homeless hordes. Which these neo-robber barons committed to the wastelands, through the management and enforcement armies serving the whims of said robber barons, more or less operating at their beck, call and disposal. On the one side of the binary are for-profit prisons, the surveillance state, the destruction of public education, health care and welfare, for the young and elderly. On the other is the $300,000,000 yacht with an IMAX theater onboard. Such disparities cry out for redress. A Tomahawk will do, in a Tea Party scenario. Yes, a revolution is in order, and it is in the works, putting itself together, a phenomenon that can be understood as the real, speculative but non-objective version of a weak conceptual pipe dream AI.

Little House, Brooklyn (2015)

I watched most of the trending documentaries and movies focusing on the art world, films like The Price of Everything. I was not impressed. All this is reminiscent of the media spillage that preceded the Great Recession, the spew that washed out of the artsy sewer trenches behind gates, on private jets and whore islands, in which the dumbluxe .00001% orgies happen. Artnet posted a 7 Best compendium for the Holiday, which I used for a short list. Of course the ubiquitous Jerry Saltz was front and center, and the usual suspects. Saltz is the equivalent of Tokyo Rose, urging artists to not be envious, and shit. The farce is strong in that one. His filthy Pulitzer, which he should timeshare with that wily punkass Walter Robinson, ought to be a poly-clay prop zombie figurine. These atrocious cunts deserve any sucker punch they get. The entire rotty lot of ‘em. If you happen to watch all the pictures artnet recommends, and you happen to be an artsy revo-lad or -lass, make another list, with the name of everyone who appears in this slipshod propaganda. Then create your masterpiece, which, if done properly, should also appear streaming on one of the services, and/or an elite cable channel. Aren’t these fancy tech terms becoming quainter by the nanosecond? & Remember: Nothing that J. Saltz writes, says or does is non-fictional.

"Zombie Formalism... Is Totally Bullshit ~ '& so are J Saltz + W Robinson" (Bushwick, 2014)

The drain is making funny noises. Must be partially clogged. The infusion of creative class projects blurring the lines between actual art and design, or commercial art, is a function of basic exchange value. As one’s identity converts into profiling, and the enormity of the transaction and redistribution of all wealth/information is achieved, and your genetic code is projected through the next few generations, whose fate is thereby determined, and the management of outcomes and incomes is stripped of any risk to the most powerful and well-vested in our human fellowship, THEN an art will appear to pay homage to the winners. Once again, art will be properly sorted. Techne will no longer be distinguishable from episteme, and the border between one and zero will be extinguished, again. Made and unmade will occur at the whim of the non-king/king. The Court Artist will be the only kind who gets paid.

"Where the Wall Stops, the Image Begins" (Williamsburg, BK 2014)

QuicktimeVR and some of the other early software tools for representing 360 degree spatial perspective in the ethereal virtual medium propose a really new optics. Hardly anyone I know of seems to have been interested in the strange artifacts generated by these programs. Like gamer glitches that happened in world-building for 1st person shooters Marathon and Doom. You could still find these bizarre schismatic features in later games like Duke Nukem, Call of Duty and Max Payne, but programmers and codes got better and worlds inside the box stabilized. Spinning around and looking up and down in virtuality is generally tedious and funky. I haven’t yet played with true next gen VR, or even the crap low-end gear and wares. At some point, while I was writing Matterhorn Project, post-Occupy, the thrill was gone. NY, and more specifically, Brooklyn, crushed VR for me - even though I was in proximity of many heavies in the field routinely.

As a result of intently studying economics, politics and management, over the past decade and a half I am skeptical of abstraction in analysis. When I hear an expert discuss “the Economy” as if that economy were a type of natural phenomenon, like weather used to be, I tend to discredit the projected narrative to follow. The academic relation to economy is fraught with conflict, and this is true of politics, management, and also society or culture, broadly speaking, the humanities. Art is located in all these sectors, and provides a neutral lens for rendering them outside the bracketing narrative. So far, the borders of art have not been determined with certainty. The definition of fine art is obviously a work of fiction in a continuum. However, the craft of art is specialized enough over centuries to require disruption on a massive scale to dislocate it (artist craft). No matter what happens, it appears, people will paint and sculpt. As long as the sun rises and sets and there are people.

…And your friends and family will want some, right artists? This is art outside economy. The price of everything artistic is not measurable in the same vernacular as Bitcoin. Which is true of almost everything, really. Only the endlessly unsatisfied hunger of the modern financial sector is averse to that reality. The Fin_Sec consciousness is a concentrated AI whose organism is Civilization itself, empire, the command and control complex, the extraction exploitation scheme. The 1 % art world as such is an extension of that program. Simply put, a rationalization and justification utility designed to uphold the principles of certainty that suspend accountability for Civilization’s current winners. One’s alignment, for or against (as W put it), will to a great degree determine one’s trajectory in relation to Civilization, if one has agency at all. Musicians really get this one, because the dynamic resembles rhythm.

Art is like the lid on the garbage can of Civilization. America is the moment when we can turn the can over and dump all that junk into the yard of the asshole who made it. We don’t have to walk past the dumpster, and sniff the putrid decay. We don’t have to drive behind the garbage truck for blocks and sink into the seat while garbage men dump oozing, fetid piles of heinous stuff into the back of the vehicle, and squash it with the machine, then cart it off to some facility or landfill to be made temporarily invisible and neutral, the worst kind of anti-truth. Meaning waste. Art despises waste. Art supposes everything and everyone is precious to begin with, because the artist wants to see everything, and see it for what it is. Life is so short. Wasting any of it is wrong.

The shadow of a thing is inseparable from that thing, except in bad dreams. Waste is imagining the shadow and thing separable, then forcing that nightmare into the visible spectrum, assigning abstract value to the process and outcome, so as to create profit and loss. A few winners get the goods. Everyone else gets the pollution and the bill. Waste is a close relative of the conception of the non-utile. It is also related to the dispensation of non-personhood, out of which arises the conception of the slave, which is useful, until such time as it (the slave) is determined to be waste. The linking of meaning to the process of creating wasteful scenarios is the task of the humanities for Civilization. Waste is inexplicable outside of Civilization. The beautiful is the weaving together of thing, shadow and a special kind of form, a shape of everything as it is at some point in its existence.

No matter how much information is collected and archived, man will only ever be capable of knowing that he is mysterious. The current massive campaign to horde all the details of each citizen should trip all a free society’s alarm systems. The danger that accompanies a pretense of certainty pertaining to the people collectively and individuals - starting with identity, extending to ideas, portending future action - is substantial. It should be obvious, why that is so. Free thought, then liberated/-ing action is and must be mutable, because it occurs in the medium of the infinite. Sorting and referencing data in an archive is not a bad idea. After the fact, an event can be remembered, made memorable, through techniques that facilitate carrying the past and present into the future. As any nomad knows, however, there is a tipping point, when the stuff that helps you recall where you came from is too burdensome for forward progress. At that junction, one has to choose whether to settle down and build a library, bury the stuff in the ground and leave a marker, or just toss it. I guess it’s a fine line between garbage and material history, if you’re a dedicated traveler. Artists generally get this conundrum, too.

The simple projection is what happens when you have a light source, and opacity interferes with the light reaching the substrate opposite the source of the directional projection (which is “thrown” or “shot,” like a javelin, arrow or discus). The mechanics of reflection and projection as they are currently practiced are usually associated with imaging or ambiance. The presenter tweaks settings usually to optimize image legibility, estimating a proper, harmonious balance between blur and focus, for example. The presenter must also be into perspectival geometry for the framing of the image thrown. The neat thing is, the science of projection is a lot the same science of stargazing, of navigating. the science of man finding his place in the universe, but also the science of man getting from point A to point B on the globe. The thinking involved is very complex, as it incorporates the spheres and both linear and 3D framing. The context is peculiar, because of multi-faceted simultaneity. The everything-happening-at-once 4D thinking occurs while we’re engaged in mechanical problem-solving. As it is linked with computing the universe and our place in it. The practical key is the diagram answering the question, How are we to physically move around in it? It being the Universe, the World, the sequence of thoughts, the exhibit/object array, our complicating relations, noting space, place and time. Or some combination of these things. On levels of layered discourse: A lot of subtext or second order thinking seems to be concerned with questions about being alone, or lonely; or here, now; and what it would be like over there; etc. Art seems to extend from thinking about the universe, trying to get someplace, and what we think of and feel in the meantime.

Participation in art events is important for artists who test reciprocity, which is a marker for free exchange in the commons. Community art is peculiarly attuned to the dynamics of the 3 A’s: affinity, appeal and attraction; these characteristics promote the binding values of the people in the community, and are tied to reproduction as a force for the group’s sustainability. Thinking of art as a gift to be shared works if the artists’ room and board are covered. Free speech is an immaterial, with actual effects. The objectification of free speech in art allows for the practice of co-liberation in formal logistical exchange. I make something: that something activates a subsequent transaction; highlights the participants’ consciousness of freedom; quality being one of the prime drivers underwriting the activity; shared existence the reason for our giving of some unique thing back - and forward, to subsequent generations.

What is local and what is global? Is there a clear divergence, post-Internet? The answers to these vital questions are complex, convoluted, dimensional. In order to effectively operate in the new prisms of awareness an artist must cultivate 4D perception. The easiest way to do that is to practice 4D art. How do you get started? First, you follow your heart, your instinct, your intuition. So what, if that sounds to the cynic trite or a cliche! To begin creating 4D art the last person you should be paying attention to is the critic whose craft is rooted in pre-4D methods and understanding. The only thing a 4D artist needs to discover to make a convincing inception to an excellent body of work is what moves her (the artist). In other words, what matters most to you right now. Collapse into that!

Surround yourself with people who will play along with you in your 4D artist enterprise. It is serious work, believe me, so choose wisely. “Curating” has been a buzz word for quite a while now, and is polysemic. When people assert themselves as curators, they may be picking out a tee shirt and a pair of sneakers to go with their old jeans. Curation is a generic, now. Finding and selecting those curious folks with whom you will collaborate on 4D art missions should be one of your top priorities, as a 4D lead artist. Review their previous work, if any. Talk to them about your concepts. Show them what you are doing. Ask them about their schedule. Are they adaptable? Have a meal with them. Will you be able to engage in production with this person, over periods of weeks, months or years, and still enjoy a supper with her or him? Mainly, wonder whether or not you share affinity, with respect to art, and what is meaningful in life. Can you grow and change together?

The artist faces challenges that other people in society do not (and vice versa). I usually tell people who ask me about art life, and are curious about pursuing a career in art, “If there is anything in your life you can do that is reasonably enjoyable, other than art, that will support you and your family, you should do that other thing. But if you have to make art to be a whole human being, don’t ever let anyone dissuade you from that path.” Why is the life of any artist difficult? Well, that simple question requires a complex, convoluted and dimensional answer. If you are wondering, please do not believe the fiction a failed artist/successful critic writes on the subject. His advice contains only enough truth to support the massive untruths he propagates routinely in his job. Instead, ask yourself first whether you can commit to ink on paper, applied with a brush. Are you willing to be as free as that to succeed, on a moment to moment basis in your own life, with no one’s permission or advice? Will you dedicate yourself to improving as an artist everyday, at least a little, for the rest of your life? If you can do these things, to begin, the challenge you propose for others will likely reveal itself in short order. Especially if your art practice inspires you to hone your tools of perception, which are instrumental in the artist’s craft. When the artist looks clearly and the world and renders it as it is, what will the world do, when it notices your undivided attention?

Living in Bushwick for eight or so years, from 2010-18. I saw a lot. If you practice for decades at seeing and rendering the world as it is, you would hope to master that facet of your dimensionist practice, the same way you would to master vital aspects of your studio craft. I have throughout my career produced text in tandem with art. It is my perspective that the two have nearly nothing to do with each other. Each is a beautiful and wondrous pursuit in its own right. Where the two forms converge is in the conversation that occurs between and among artists, ourselves. I firmly believe that, whenever possible, those discussions should occur in the commons. Further, I would suggest that artists make fine citizens. A proficient 4D artist, as a by-product of his research and analysis, is chock-full of good data about the condition and circumstances, the realities, percolating currently in the society that artist inhabits. That society is wasting a prime opportunity by not approaching artists and inquiring politely about what the artist is seeing. Artist perception is itself valuable in a democracy, in the commons.

Photography, particularly the kind I am calling “JUNK” photography, is really a key to 4D art technique and theory. Why? The 4D artist practice is progressive, sequential and keyed to emerging and evolving patterns. Self-monitoring one’s progress is a daily element for in the 4D artist life. Speaking for myself, it is also one of the most fun aspects of what we do. One does not have to be an artist to practice and improve seeing the world. In fact, everyone who tries it benefits, and that benefit can be shared. The masses have in this area witnessed and produced an astonishing perceptual upgrade, since networked “smart” mobile phones and their onboard cameras have become ubiquitous. At some unknowable point the deluge of media exchanged in wired communities changed previous notions of visionary competition in photography. The people unleashed a monumental DDoS hack on the argument of who is the best photographer. That became the story for a while. Simultaneously, artists and photographers did what they inevitably do and followed the available threads as far as humanly possible. We are extremists, generally speaking, but only in specific ways. Leave it to the madcap amateurs to fall off cliffs for that influential selfie.

In the contemporary or the current, the 4D artist finds a subtext that permits anything. The artist then engages in a relationship with permissiveness that is to some degree, in some measure, defining of art and artist. The relationship itself is inexplicable. The accepted terms (like contemporary) are meaningless, for most practical purposes. The celebration of critical discourse in order to position it oppressively in relation to the artistic is a defining feature of the era. At this point an artist can exist or not exist, and the machinery of art industry will not “care.” Because waste is invaluable to the industrialists who benefit the most in the scenario. The other side of the scarcity coin in art economy is massive waste. The literature of art has become fixated on the discourse of scarcity, which is the common language of art institutions, academies, primary and secondary markets. Only rare voices like Greg Sholette’s periodically emerge to radically challenge the status quo. The internet threatens to upend the whole rotten contraption, but has not done so yet. What remains to be seen is whether the monopolists of the Big 5 will do to art what they have done across the spectrum of human enterprise.

Of more immediate concern is the lossy effect generated by the waste industrial culture. The romantic fictional narrative orbiting around the identification of genius is in jeopardy, undermined by an all-directional assault on the canon. The contemporary conception for art and society demands that all players orient to late Civilization or be reduced to ashes, literally and figuratively. That dynamic in itself is nothing new at all. What is novel is the virtual element at play in the configuration of personhood to self and collective. The fake or artificial person is represented dimensionally across virtual and analog culture systems. An avatar and a corporation share many synthetic characteristics. Success in all facets of existence - being and impacts, causation or activity - must be measurable. The problem with this logic is that loss is impossible to measure with certainty.

A correlate is the mountaintop removal operation for minerals, like coal. All the root assumptions are mad. The natural logic that would refute the industrial objective - energetic, material plunder - is set aside. The dismissal of the contrary thought as a means to an end is one of the defining characteristics of Civilization. When citizens jack into the awareness of this fact, they do so often in a state of duress. The system is designed that way, in order to improve the likelihood that citizen action will fail to derail the industrial objective. When people complain about the rigging of governance systems, they are outraged by the pre-existing conditions within those systems that improve the chance of positive outcome for industry over citizens. However, an accurate representative explanation or description for the inequitable status quo is insufficient. Adequate, meaning fair, representation is what the situation calls for. Depending on one’s ethical framework, punishment for those who rigged the system is also warranted.

A 4D artist becomes eventually an evidence specialist. To borrow a titular phrase from Bob Dylan, the art is a derivative of blood on the tracks. The concept of evidence, which is colored by its crime and punishment associations, echoes humanity’s prominent concern with legacy. Art happens within the impulse to produce a mark in passing existence. The presence of Time in the rich, diverse immaterial resources for art we are scanning is as unavoidable as it is impenetrable. The universe for man is indicated by the hunger in his belly and the lust in his loins. Time deals with those issues for each of us, in our duration. This is not a particularly gendered subject. The linga and yoni are structural twins, in objective dimensional analysis, or a paired set. Binaries are insufficient to satisfy the burden of evidence. Either and or cannot suffice to provision our collective and individual futures. Yet, we live in a continuum for sensation, while we are alive. Therefore our minds and bodies, our feelings, our Spirit, need something to do in the meantime (meantime meaning the time spanning birth and death.

Post-Internet is an ineffectual term of displacement. It really is a stand-in for Post-Occupy. Recalling the art world experts summoning fun art, light art after the collapse of OWS, I associate the panic and urgency of the frightened cultured collaborators (the aesthetic minions of the art investing superclass, who essentially exhorted ambitious “emerging” artists to behave like scabs) with the behavior of the soulless hacks of the 19th and 20th centuries paid by robber barons to produce tracts in defense of philanthropy to hide the industrialist propensity for mass murder, larceny and political corruption. Technologists tend to embrace a neo-libertarian ideology, contiguous to extreme neo-conservative and neo-liberal management approaches. In short they operate dimensionally, in the liminal space between material super-wealth and virtual power, property and reproduction. The new age dawning is innovatively dystopian, feudalistic and brutal. The pros, the experts got what they asked for from the wannabees. Then Walter and Jerry turned on them and kicked off the ZF thing. Such art world volatility passes for entertainment among the top players, for whom the system is rigged, anyway.

We can catch a glimpse of America now and again. The fiction produced by corporate media syndicates is catastrophic. The fresh solution for our collective malaise is the straightforward type. For-profit press is to be outlawed, along with for-profit medicine, war, education, politics, prison, surveillance, reproduction and so on. Profits are to be relegated to actual industry and production. Profit and loss must be relocated into 4 dimensions, along with perception. What is this 4th dimension, you ask? Why, it is the space in which the material and immaterial get together to have a party, to dance, to philosophize, to exchange digits, to make experience, to get it on! If humankind don’t recalibrate awareness to the next phase of reality, we hardly have a chance of survival in a recognizable, much less meaningful form. Our customs will disappear altogether. Art is customary. So is courtship. Money is not customary. It is the superimposition of King and Church. Today it is re-fabricated, -outfitted in the accoutrements of mercantile neutrality. None of it is to be trusted. All of it is blatantly fictional.

The desire for safety and security is a folly. Like any secret hidden in fallacy, everyone knows. The obvious is suppressed by the oblivious. Anyone and anything can be gotten to. The sham rich will discover this oldest of truths, again, and be surprised. Shocked, I tell you! A smack in the face can be applied as intervention to save the world. Fire is a tool for purification of the senses. Smoke can be a bath one takes to cleanse the surface of one’s fragility. Mankind has found so many decent ways to harmonize with an originally scary universe. Holding hands with another person is still one of the best, in my mind. Centering society on the cultivation of the young and caring for the elderly and sick is always called for. Insisting that everyone be fed properly seems rudimentary, does it not? We have seen what running our nation more like a business means, and we can now reject that notion with prejudice, and forever. Our nation, and art.

By 2014, I will admit I was almost entirely disgusted with the NYC art scene. What I witnessed as a participant in OWS, and what I experienced afterward, drained me of a lifetime of cultivated affection for the city and its artistic wonders. To holler “COWARDICE” in the atrium of MoMA or the Met or Gugg or Whitney or New Museum is not satisfaction, although we did that. To show by example new and better ways forward is not enough, but we did that, too. Throwing our bodies to the cops is stupid, but it was done, repeatedly. I couldn’t stand for it for long, because I have a propensity for righteous anger and a deep loathing of bullies of every stripe. I learned that the us against them binary was as finished as every other binary, unless the either/or were reconfigured for and within the 4D application. Explaining that fact to anyone still invested in binary society proved a pointless exercise. Post-Occupy, NYC became a parody, a faithless Bloombergian simulation of the Gotham I had fallen in love with as a young and impressionable artist. In the end I was ecstatic to leave it behind. New York City will always hate and seek to crush art and artists that contradict the property rackets. Judd was correct in his assessment. He was right to move to Marfa (and keep the pad on Spring).

& Around it goes. Art is a metaelement that no owner can possess. Intellectual property is a fiction, and a very profitable one for a few people and their syndicates and conglomerates. No one need honor the oligarchs, nor respect their ideas or position. America is not a nation founded in the interests of the aristocracy, new or old, well-bred and poor-bred rags to riches-types. Inventors are not a special class of citizen, afforded extraordinary rights and privileges. International tribunals and alliances, representing the interests of foreign tyrants and sun-gods have no especial portents vested upon them in America. The refinement of kings and their courts is rejected on these shores. Yet throughout our history the cycle of betrayal and invasion is spinning. Ultimately, for the sake of all who have been ravaged by the will of human monsters whose black souls desire most to dominate and thereby diminish their fellows, we must put down these beasts once and forever.

Yet I find myself watching Schnabel’s movie about van Gogh, and I am moved. The animation of a couple of years ago was fantastic, but for me it was a meaningful technical exercise, first and foremost. Vincent is almost a cinematic genre. The thought of Europe and its historical, fraught position on artists, and the destiny of van Gogh, it is terribly troubling, is it not? The long trajectory reveals everything about the meaning of art to Civilization. It is in the auction house, where the masterpiece of the future is slated to be sold, like a slave on the block. That America should be assigned the guilt for Europe’s vast slave complex, its genocidal obsessions, it sack and pillage momentum is a farce. Of all the nations on the planet, and all the empires humanity has projected, America least of all is condemned to the brutal mechanics of empire. Yet, the cynics and anarchists in their histrionic menace agree: our country tis of thee, they cry for blood. Whether of ignorance or willful displacement their motivation is emitted, the vacuum of their integrity collectively is manifest. The condemnation of America within art circles is keenly wrong. If not for America, for men like Pollock, art itself would have been doomed by the atrocities visited upon the world by Europe and its allies.

Why pick on Europe? I also watched a documentary on Yayoi Kusama. What to make of a media package like Infinity’s? Is an artist bio-pic produced in 2018 meant to inspire a following, mass buzz, improved value for the artist’s work? All of the above? In part the documentary is framed as a human interest story. Another facet involves a reassessment of Kusama’s import to the evolution of contemporary art practice. Another questions the biases of the art world decades ago, but also those of Japanese society. The portrayal of madness in Kusama is poignant in juxtaposition with the depiction of van Gogh’s. Is there a typical blindness in Kusama’s desire to achieve artistic greatness? I found the postwar artist’s ambition confounding. Is the artist bug viral. Was Kusama one of the first cases in Japan? The aesthetic exchange between Europe and Asia, and Japan specifically is worth reporting. After trade developed between East and West, European artists, including Impressionists, became interested in the painting craft and cultural sensibility of the Orient, in mostly the superficial or decorative quality, although it could be argued that the approaches to sketching practiced in Europe were impacted by greater exposure to Oriental techniques. How about Egon? The contemporary permits the isolation of an event from the consumptive meaning in which the event forms. The contemporary is the age of tactical editing. The management of the sign is transmuted into force, now. 4D production gaslights the retarding energy of management and contains it in the designated area for explication. Transparency, revelation, intensity and the visceral self are flattened in a virtual version of rules of aesthetic engagement, which countermand the permissive consumption of the contemporary maxim. Reanimation in the dimensionist model suggests a natural cycle, a seasonal communion that yields a properly structured additive element in the phenomenon. One thing leads to another (not-)thing.

When an artist opposes the art industrial complex, the position can be complicated. Opposition can arise from the artist’s moral concerns. There is much in the 1%er art world that is gruesome. The system itself is rigged and intertwined with the broader rigged, global networked economy. An artist may reject the art market on personal grounds. Relationships govern outcomes to a significant extent in the art industry. A meritocracy in the top tier marketplace is a productive illusion today. Artists reject the art scene on a local to global basis and vice versa. The trends promulgated through tools in the art press and in informal circles, influential to weak, promote an art processing mechanism that is hardly based on anything but bias. The aphorism that ART IS SUBJECTIVE is a fallacy that essentially serves the inconsistent criteria for success in the art world. The status quo established by the unknowing expert class in art ultimately preserves those experts’ unaccountability. The art markets are unregulated, which makes its corruption a certainty. An artist opposed to corruption is repulsed by the pettiness, the grotesque, the exploitative, the greedy and cowardly common in the art business.

The heroic artist was reduced to a fairy tale in the art world as a hedge against critique arising from the artists themselves. Artists who craved democracy in the art world, especially after the promise exposed by the success of New Deal era public art programs, posed a powerful threat to the elites who governed the art world. The vestiges of Court and Religious dispensations for artists survived the Depression to the extent that the systematic recovery could be effected over the next century. Today we see a new iteration of the old Civilization for art. The formidable network of global aristocracy featuring an impressively reorganized mix of old and new blood, new methods of managing and hiding wealth, including art investment, powers a decades’ long reformation in the humanities. The powerful, rich and their heirs are firmly ensconced as puppet masters in the free speech arenas spanning the planet. The control of media, communications technology, the most valuable means of production, military and political states, the courts is located in the portfolios of the world’s richest families and individuals, and their corporate syndicates and their formal and informal associations. A half-century program to destroy any meaningful resistance has achieved its many of its objectives.

The power of seduction is pervasive in the art business. The view from the top is incredible. The collector class is currently in possession of portions of the economy as great as feudal times. These individuals can offer an artist in favor practically anything one might desire. These individuals and the management and distribution networks they belong to or own can also effectively erase the value of the artist in disfavor, and excommunicate the work an artist creates. Seth Price’s essay can be understood now for what it was: a vague aphorism that displaced the potential logic for hierarchical causation at that critical moment in contemporary art; the dispersion that actually happened was directional, and its benefits have accrued to superclass players, among whom Price himself is positioned. The notable franchises (e.g., Koons, Hirst, Richter, etc.) are carefully represented in every sector of the art world topology. Their value is cultivated. If an artist is offered a place at this rich and putrid table, what force can propel him to reject the maneuvers of his incubus?

The myth of the male gaze is fragmenting the art world into divisions that ultimately empower the most powerful. The marginalization of those most dangerous to the plundering class, the elites who thrive on inequality is the subtext for much movement in art discourse. A good example is the transformation of art and new media discursive vehicles like Hyperallergic. This influential portal has skewed dynamically to a narrow editorial definition of art, post-Occupy. While promoting itself as a voice for the disenfranchised in and by art industrial forces, Hyperallergic is still simpatico with the art industrial system, as such. The utility of an identity-based neo-avant garde, hedged by elision of serious analysis of art world currencies neuters the platform. The method is typical strategy among contingent actors in the art and culture sector. Variations are indicated in institutional and organizational addiction to elite or superclass philanthropy. The tax structure itself in America is a brazen co-conspirator in the influence rackets that dominate the humanities. Art as a means for tax evasion and currency manipulation is a known quantity. The art market has long served the superrich in their efforts to launder money and move it across national borders.

The inventory of art available for consumption is huge. What is lacking is a national distribution network for original art that would enable every person in America to own original art. The alternative economies for art, outside the stupid, banal, mediocre 1% contemporary markets, hold tremendous promise for sustainable art commerce. The vision of future generations is at stake, and imagination is key to survival. Creativity and free speech facilitate the mechanisms that fix broken parts of society. The effectiveness of sharing economies woven into social fabric from the bottom up is indisputable, provable fact. Abandoning leadership to a few industrial winners is the kind of suicidal, self-defeating gesture that put Donald Trump in the White House, and left Bernie Sanders in the cold. The 2016 election made so much of the old political system transparent, starting with the blatant corruption consuming the Democratic party. Now, it is only possible to pretend that democracy in America is operative with the aid of fake news. In the art world, the situation is no different, in the sense that fake art and artists dominate the medium.

The art fair model is rupturing the fabric of democratic and national art scenes. The supra-networks that drive the commerce the fairs produce for specific populations of artist and collector and connecting agent are by now fairly well documented. The effects of the radical reshaping of art exchange is best represented in the Frieze phenomenon. The resonance of the contemporary art fair system and the parallel networks operating as periodic unified field promotions (annual, bi-annual, triennial, etc. expositions.) have served to weaken the centralization of power in location (e.g., Paris, London, New York). Brick and Mortar establishments are being crushed. The big winners of course are eco-nomad or supranational power elites. In tandem with freeport warehousing for art, the deleterious influence of the top art-buying cohort is incalculable. The super wealthy can purchase a masterpiece to remove it from public view.

In this environment, what is appropriate subject matter? The opprobrium embodied in the Zombie Formalism critique had a chilling effect on the artist-driven, “subterranean medicine” swirling through cultural and academic discourse, post-Occupy. Some of the few remaining professional art writers, including a handful of influencers based in New York City, effectively reoriented art evaluation to the snarky banter of the ubiquitous beaters and survivors who manage to appear at every noteworthy event over decades. As one might expect. So what if their criticisms so routinely prove faulty! So what if they turn out to be venal, co-opted moochers and parasites, who cling to their vestigial seats near the power tables! So what if their exclamations and proclamations eventually dissolve upon close scrutiny! These players learned social media, developed followings, understand click-traffic, are attentive to management’s needs, and can project the proper setting of obsequious or free presser depending on context. Now the critic argues that he or she knows subject matter when he or she sees it, and that’s it. The largesse of the privileged, and the selection of winners and losers to please the powerful, is a bane on art for everyone. God bless Robert Cenedella! Whatever, the gesture! Efficient direct action is another thing. How desperate will the people become, to unseat their oppressors? Artists?

Is it possible for art to exist outside the star systems that dominate the markets? Of course, we might opine! Yet it is a kind of complicity to suggest to any economically, politically, socially oppressed artist that external validation in any of those key sectors is “so what!” Validation is invaluable to all but a few artists. Art is itself a reciprocal confirmation of humanity, by humans for humans. Validation is humane. To block the artistic progress of an individual or group is tantamount to inhibiting spiritual evolution. It is evil. Depriving a generation of artists the necessary validation (material and immaterial) involves decoupling people from the means of support for their own choices, their values and their meaning, all of which supply art with its urgency and currency. The elites understand this implicitly, and they explicitly subvert the power of democratic art at every level, simply by co-opting the process of establishing art hierarchy. Instead of a logical criteria for quality in art fashioned from the ground up, the elites insist they are best at championing the best in contemporary art through their purchase and promotional authority. Clearly this contention is false.

In fact, the art world for the 1% is outdated, is obsolete. It is not 4D. The availability of every element required to establish meaningful art collectives of every description is available via the internet, and has been now for almost three decades. What is most obvious now is the unprecedented threat posed by consolidation of culture power in the sphere of the technologist. The battles among the Big 5 are like the movie monster wars in the old serial Godzilla franchise. They would be hilarious, if they weren’t so horrifying to the impressionable imagination. The imposition of alien sensibility is one of the main ingredients in the rise of digital and virtual conglomerates and robber barons. The inversion of definitions of creativity to suit the narratives of tech industrialism (e.g., Jobs) approaches mythological in its hyperbole. The very real problems caused by overwriting the analog aspects of human interactivity are eroding any fundamental legitimacy for technological democracy. The very existence of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, et al. represents a profound policy failure in America. The value lost is similar to that extracted from the Black Hills, or Cerro Rico. These men and their co-conspirators are not heroic. They should be tried for crimes against humanity. Instead the people get show trials, media hearings, with no consequences for the richest, and most harmful, among us.

The marketing of technology is now its own shadow. We see this with products like Google Glass, but the axiom applies across the sector. Workers in China burning themselves alive to protest conditions in factories producing products like iPhones are not just a spin and containment exercise in brand damage control. The industrial standards and practices at Amazon distribution centers are not anomalous instances of bad apple-ism. The destructive effects on cities, towns and households caused by corporate technological power is immeasurably high. We are witnessing a boom for a few key players that precipitates a bust for almost everyone else. The tech utopian vision of the future has panned out for almost no one. The savvy of Bill Gates and his ilk is the same type of anti-democratic intelligence that previous robber barons mustered throughout the massive crises their lives and interests engender. These people are sociopathic fools who believe the hype about themselves and their products, at all costs, no matter what. They should be redistributed out of existence.

We must not conflate the power of these desperate and despicable men and women with the power of nature, of beauty, of art. When an idiot suggests that Andy Warhol is the GOAT, he or she must be shouted down. When Eli Broad, or the Walton heirs, or Steve Cohen, etc., present their collections in vanity museums designed to compete with prominent private/public art foundations and institutions, or gain influence and opportunity through the pay-to-play boards of those very foundations and institutions, and expect our collective approval, respond appropriately with outrage. The most recent case is Glenstone, a billionaire’s museum, the unfortunate name of which evokes claptrap suburban condo communities. The collection is what one would expect, including the big Koons garden dog. When the will to power is rewarded, sometimes the powerful hedge the hatred their horded treasure manifests through the absolving caresses of the Muse, through art, and through the sensation that art giving can supply. We can reject the premise that the people will enjoy poverty with a sugar coating of art at the end. This formula is the embodiment of "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche." What is the appropriate French revolutionary response?

The artist is as fungible as money, in the eyes of the new oligarch collector. The main qualification for any artist is viability. This characteristic translates to complicity. A second string of artists consist of those who overtly refuse complicity, but crave the limelight and prosperity that accompany their selection into the global 1%er fold (e.g., Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, Ai Wei Wei, Thomas Hirschhorn, and so on). One of the most egregious episodes in contemporary artist fungibility was Occupy Mana. This production, curated by notorious 1% art world ass-kisser Phong Bui of the Brooklyn Rail, which I once wrote for (for free, during Occupy, while Ted Hamm and Williams Cole were still co-editors at BR), was an absolute dumpster fire of complicity. The Mana Contemporary project is the brainchild of Moishe Mana, the mover mogul, whose agenda now incorporates dimensional principles for empire building simultaneously rooted in all sectors social, commercial and political. Establishing “campuses” across America, billionaire Mana is using art and culture to grease the wheels of property acquisition, global corporate integration, providing essential services to Israel and various Jewish interests here and abroad, and to enhance his personal wealth, prestige, power and reproductive capacity.

The commons is a mushy place for imagination, given that the zone for free speech is diminishing at a staggeringly accelerated pace. The peculiarly American exhortation for the inventor to create something, unique, novel, something that will catch on, has legs, take off, is not strangled in our throat by interleaved property engines and promotions. For artists the non-competition is fierce. The consumer portable culture industries exist within enormous corporate portfolios. The giant conglomerates operate as tandem network markets, supportive of pyramid or ponzi schemes. Their configurations help justify the financialization of global economies, a stupefying range of creative destructive business practices, political interventions that include extreme lobbying (see ALEC), social-shaping forwarded by strategic or tactical philanthropy, and more. Combined, these syndicates push along the destabilization of nations, including democracies like the US and UK, through privatization programs and horrifying policy follies. Conferences like WEF and Bilderberg are the operational tips of the iceberg for these globalists, whose “pioneers” include David Rockefeller, Henry Kissenger and other democracy-hating heirs and agents. MoMA is a nexus for this invisible power machine.

The diverse practices of sampling for image creation and a host of other virtual production have definitively retooled the visual topology. The measure of identity now is disheveled. Metadata is a digital standard for authenticity. Blockchain is disrupting this approach, while appearing to concretize it. The philosophical lens through which these phenomena uncover themselves is in a word infinity. The infinite is the corporate personhood dream, it is the novelty of Time itself, it is the evasion of measurement. Infinity spawns the finite within the confines of a history that is forever malleable. History is incrementally conquered by they infinite syndicates and their finite temporary workers. Gigs are the intercourse between historical corporate man and the proverbial modern common man. The average Joe and Jane the honey pot of human resourcing. The demographic target of the disposable income markets (of which art is only one) shift through the graphs of actuary tables, and other data accumulations. One’s profile is one’s destiny in the corporate hive mind. It is a stretch for most people to conceive how their circles of friends and relatives, interests and purchases, education and profession lineage betray us to the corporate networks, which we now know, thanks to Snowden and others, are part of a complex, global Surveillance State.

The unreliability of sense data is for the first time in centuries not the primary issue of thinking Western man. The uber-schism is the debilitating factor, the crisis of mind. The game of psychoanalysis has begotten industrial and military operations that threaten the chemical, physical, biological man and his environment with total obliteration. Science is pointing a gun, a great, HUGE gun at the head of thinking man, and asking him, “Well, do you feel lucky, Punk?” Although scientists deny it, because the field of professional science is once again subservient to the whims of the super rich, and no longer an action-wing of an able democracy. If Elon Musk has in short order fallen from a whiz kid perch like an entrepreneurial sci/tech handsome egghead Humpty Dumpty, then where does that leave NASA, Detroit, and so many other public goods. Like the kind that built the Internet and the analog Freeway system. The Branson billionaire class have lots of ideas for running everything like commercial fiefdoms as a feature of their individual liberation from all constraint, and the divine rightness of that certain recipe for cataclysm. Game of Thrones in essence is a Self narrative, which explains its unsurprising popularity. The 99% cannot comprehend that our characters are the white walkers, the mob, the cannibal masses, come finally to eat the rich. I prefer Mr Robot, myself, although I am no fan of schizoid television or its Freudian roots. Reality affirms that the predators and scavengers will wait for us to appear, because we are their food. We can make them die waiting.

I had the good fortune of growing up among strong Americans. They are dying, after long, industrious lives. I gathered over the past half century of monumental change a scrapbook of personal history that chronicles the significant relationships of my life. Art is a presence in my trajectory. The value of art is variable among friends, family, lovers, people with whom I’ve worked. The price tag is untethered to the object, its figures blurred by contiguous desire, all economy fading by the minute, a groan dubiously posted next to art itself. When juxtaposing death and art, the synthetic element should be love. This is not my opinion. In a way, I could care less about that, because I believe in an autonomous zone for art, where even love must succumb. This is the opinion of Man. This is the inevitable power of Woman. No one should have ever believed Benjamin, who understood nothing about liberation and reproduction. He proved this with his suicide, and admitted to it in his texts. All who have attempted to further Walter Benjamin’s legacy with respect to art are complicit in his grift, his graft, his long con. A patsy is a patsy because he won’t get off the hook, and that is because of his weakness (Boris Groys).

Victimization is a poor subject for art, but not for the reason one might think. The provision of thematic color to content creates a set of problems that have naught to do with aesthetics. Brutality is simple to represent for a colorist, because the brutal is easily understood, if one exists in a brutal age. We are rich in brutishness currently. The colors are primarily blue and red, set to black, with accents of ochre and shades of green, on a spectrum of natural to unnatural. The shading of a brute composition for the purpose of illustrating victimizing of creatures great and small is minimal in effect. Broad strokes are best. Splattering adds a dose of realism to the image. The best sketching mode for representing the victim is the caricature style of the day. Humor and horror couple properly in vernacular art, which is the purview of victimization content. Yet this is really weak material for art, because art is never for propaganda. Propaganda infers conversion and conquest, which are antithetical to art free of Civilized malevolence. Action and reaction do not occur in art in exactly the same process they do in other realms, like science, politics, war and society. Art itself has no true language of reason and justification outside itself. Thus it resists being for or against anything and anyone. The color is not simple. It is complex, magical and beautiful, and it is ageless, even as Time changes it.

How important is an overview, which is a kind of monotone recursion device? The value of high altitude representation or vision is contained in the purifying nature of distance in the imagination. The stench of failure is not noticeable high above the fray. The howls of casualties are lost in the winds. The noise of grinding machinery becomes a comfortable silence disturbed only by thunder or wind, periodically. Ultimately, even those disturbances give way to the inky black of yonder, if one can get high enough. Drone-view presents an interstitial territory between the satellite picture and grounded visual (and other sensual) experience. Not too long ago, mountaintops, planes and skyscrapers, etc., offered the attraction of heightened awareness for us. Oh, and I guess, drugs and alcohol, which get us HIGH. Now the drone is transitioning into civilian life, after proving its success as in war, as a spy and assassination robot. The drone is one of the latest inventions with military industrial applications that is being repurposed for peacetime, and its smiley face is being fabricated through a gaggle of non-art art channels. These include digital (online) media, new cinema production, video art, performances, projection- and monitor-based installations and vignettes, and so on. Drone technology and art actually have nothing to do with each other. AT ALL.

The structures of vision can no longer be reduced to geometry. The math is become infinity, literally. Dimensional numbers are not contained in 2D or 3D borders. The most important immigration of our Age is the crossing of boundaries artificially separating less-than 4D and 4D territories. On the other side of the new Great Divide is a topology that to old eyes is phenomenal, wondrous, stupendous. Its additive nature is inherent. Its quality is incessant and unavoidable. The material factory it proposes is hinted at by so-called 3D printing. The doping systems for altered awareness will make obsolete many presuppositions about personality and mental health. Whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen. In the context of this essay, by the way, the immediately previous statement is humorous in kind. 4D dissolves and resolves seamlessly all form connected by immaterial. Transubstantiation is a normal feature of 4D environments. The miraculous is a facet of the status quo, not an anomaly. The first definition that will require revision is the definition(s) of a 4th Dimension, which has multiple meanings across multiple disciplines, and has become a confusing term as a direct result. The language of convolution, which better resembles our brain structure, must be adopted over time to supplant the recursive narrative for a dimensionist actuality.

The conception of Self will be reassessed. It will necessitate a complex image of one’s personhood as a distributed entity. The components are combined virtual and actual. The scope of the Self consciousness spans inner, outer and secret arenas of existence. Performance itself constitutes a fourth spatial reserve, a convergent quadrant wherein the action of material on immaterial (and vice versa) occur. Who, who does what and why, and the logic of intent and motivation where it exists as a visible phenomenon is the grist of 4D performance. The action of Self is not reducible as such to any particular narrative, except with the precondition of fiction as a benevolent determinant. A kind destiny for each and all is the 4D mythos, but bathos and pathos are the content of 4D art. Reciprocity is an ameliorant for competition among actors, for hierarchical disembowelment, for taking and rentier behaviorism, and for many other corrosive expressions of self. This bracing filament for art, its cyclic stem, its root pattern, is as ancient as humanity itself and will remain unchanged through the transit into 4D perceptual arts. The gift Spirit is the modal preservation of human consciousness, our fundamental intelligence or Mind.

Art serving multidimensional people in the iside-outside-private-publically performing Selfie-ness is hard to visualize in advance. As a producer of such art, now for several decades, I marvel at the smoothness of the transition between less-than 4D art and vision and 4D+. The perceptual advances are inexorable, and their inevitability renders them invisible to primitive Civilization. Advanced tribal cultures celebrate the new perception, even if they have their own issues to contend with during the radical shift. For those emerging from ancient visionary society into the new thing, the PTSD is terrible, as is the tight-in-places crossover between the oldest ways of seeing and these unfolding forms. I can suggest a forgiving practice, balanced with cruelty for those who made crime against humanity, in many cases by criminalizing humanity itself. The pollutants injected throughout the world and its inhabitants at the behest of overlords will take millennia to undo or process. It will be another age before people can assess the damage. I don’t know if there is an art for healing such wounds, but I hope there is. My efforts as an artist, if I were ever to encode my own artistic aspirations, are to help platform that art, to seed it, and to propel it into the world, like spores on a strong warm summer wind.

We wish for freedom. Only the slave master prefers no one, not even himself, to be confident in one’s comprehension of freedoms. 4D perception can be, must be a vehicle for freedom. It cannot grow, progress, evolve, otherwise. In such circumstances, in the event of 4D’s demise - whatever that might look like - humanity itself perishes. Will the planet die? Who knows?! For people, in our Self-mode profile, how will the human-absent future matter, in any conception we can possibly frame? The absurdity of speculation beyond the existential, past our own cancellation, the ultimate negation defies all poetry. No conjecture can propose an image that survives our species’ survival. When people seek to prioritize earth over man, they underestimate the power of mind to subvert its own logic. Stupidity and intelligence are form and shadow of Mind over Spirit over Body. Sensation trumps the mechanics of knowing and easy logic of belief, at least temporarily. As long as people delude ourselves with metaphor, the language of causality will convince us to do immensely stupid acts. Art is never metaphorical. Descriptions of art always are metaphorical, and therefore fictional. People wish themselves to be art itself, or at least art-like. Such is the root of evil, as much as money, or the goofball pretense to divinity for earthy creatures.

My bones ache. My body is growing older by the day. Strangely enough, I do not think of aging as a linear process, but that is due to willfulness on my part, overthinking really, a refusal to surrender to the sensational as a matter of course. Survival is practical and speculative as woven form. I would suggest the Dream to be the proper and best reference for the experiential in human nature. You can walk in my shoe all you want, but if you can’t tune into my frequency, man, you’ll only get a fraction of what my “like” is like. An artist starts with the personal universal, which of course is an insoluble conception. The impossible is perfect for beginning any journey, and a necessity for anyone with epic aspirations. Art life is what it is, and it will not be exactly the same for any two artists, which is true of life in general. The American artist is an endangered species, a chimera, improperly diagnosed, just another citizen. God help us, art is the signal flag of sunset. We hoist it at our own risk. Still, it is good to recognize there are more of us than ever before, in the history of the world, as far as we know. Going back to dinosaurs.

I started writing my dissertation text by hand in autumn 2015, and finished more or less two years later. Most days I would pound out pages, sitting at OSLO coffee shop in Williamsburg. I had sold my camera gear to help fun my second intensive summer session at the European Graduate School. At the time, I had an idea that after decades of shooting photography, I needed to reboot my artistic/optical/vision apparatus anyway. I needed see the world again, minus the mechanics of framing and executing the shot. In short I tricked myself into believing I had temporarily paused my photo craft, when, actually, I was switching to a different, new mode. The pictures in CONTEXT reflect the new approach. The method integrates meta-elements, pulled from the 4D VyNIL "card" sets. The virtual patina on the images is specific to this series, but the processing techniques at this point are the product of many years' practice. The CONTEXT series narrative summary might read: These mobile phone camera pictures represent junk that happened while I was writing my thesis in Brooklyn. Plus things that may have been going on in the back channels of my brain, while the rest of that organ was occupied with 4D theory, systems analysis, aesthetics and so on, for the four PhD books I wrote between 2015-17, give or take a year for pre- and post-.

A 2019 AFH Manifesto Poem Story Post

I found my voice in a holster

I follow an echo into a river

No mystic venture strips a hull full of holes

This heart is riven by hollow promises

Lost to me.

I moved my people cross a desert

Torments of winter we bore

A dark wind in their fingers, curling and shaken

Roots shearing underground breakin

witnesses

Lost in the sea.

A cravin not literal but actual hunger

my relatives lingering on the edge of camp,

fearful of a Shade flickerin

by a tipi door flap. You hold my hand,

snakes held @ bay by a fire in a shallow pit,

dug out of the blue clay

with a pick and a spade

I know we

Will find our lost keys in the shallows

or the weeds along a walking path

to a car park.

Teeth rotting in my mouth and foot

Swelling too

stinking

a new anguish

With each rising sun. I tell the boy

An eclipse is come,

and a misting of rain will

Wash your sorrows away.

Don’t look fellas,

Don’t look, she ~ no more

can she hear you.

I thought

she would not tarry

by a dock in a gale

Waves as tall as towers

I got a carved stick to beat a hand drum.

I made a good noise like sea lions

en e foyggye fieyelds teh flrrrighten doom

as ‘hey marrcht oos doon.

Scaly bodies are hidden

In the nets of fishers who line the banks

with torches

bangn pots loud, hard w spoons.

Still they are coming, a witherin’ hatred.

Nay carved a shield beyond reckon

No pendant or ward repels the advance

Ne surrender is offered & none will be given

We join arms, lower our heads, keep eyes upon them,

their line is crimson, then black

B’nighted, a shufflin horde right ‘pon oor main,

a clang of metal n flaish shorn asunder,

we stood strung ayn solid buoy

You did wonder ifn I tells it fair and flush, I does

Child, I do.

A massyv m bled out into yon crick

gore soak’d soil round here n here n thyar

everwun like ta cheer, n ta weep

‘neath ay bluddy full woolf moon

bay a dismal niche.

We ladled clain watersh n ate smoke faysh

scorchin flames n dancin merray,

scratching prayers inta tin foil,

reciten poems (pomez), sungs bye d scuore.

Scatterin survivors fled in pickups

Or by train. The choppers hunted stragglers

up ravines n th’ Column.

Seamstresses staid t stitch a history,

but tis us who knows wha happen’d, sure.

You child.

Our axes a bone an hair

Hung on a wall yonder, amidst trophies

Ar foinest heirlooms, b’God, see m?

Woven ena tartan ew don aych marnin

‘s a message you wull carry t kith and tew kin,

A warnin to any who betray their clan folk

Nstead to chase fame, bluster n gin.

Gold, dat sairpnt

it shines n silver,

sparklay emeralds and busy numbers

snaky payper n deeds. Yes

Some will not bow nor borrow, nor sway like reeds.

We plot grain seeds in th’ beds naow dry and dreamy

with harvests watersh we feed m a trickle then

a flood

The shoots swell to the sky

then oor mad prophat he howels out for rivets

to fall n fly upon the beast of arrows

to strip m o all her waste o gran’ fortunes,

to bury m in comeuppance of measures

stoneless, toomluss

To end m for good

to end m wi brute pleasure

Together we waves o warrior human

to sing m away for-e’er n a day

a day a heroes n tales adorned

w smears o rosy paint on oor torn glad visage

Zuccotti [Photo by Chris Borrok (2019)]

Proposition 4D

I INTRODUCTION

{or Prop4D} ~A Proposal for the Disposition and Dispersal of the 4D VyNIL paintings: Toward a new economic model for the exchange of original art and the compensation of the artist; for the establishment of sustainable, equitable systems in arts and culture.

IA

Paul McLean is an artist, currently based in Astoria, Oregon. In 2017 and -18, McLean produced and documented the production of a series of paintings, consisting of distinct sub-series that combine to form a distinct body of work (4D VyNIL). The art is unified by applied materials, concept, methods of application, visible consistency, size distributions, color, composition, narrative and other relevant means. The 4D VyNIL series was presented to select individuals through open studios, virtual platforms and a comprehensive installation (“HOME SHOW”). The production of the art was documented throughout its period of creation.

IB

Throughout his career the artist has engaged in the exchange of art, beginning with his own work. He has also worked in art businesses, periodically establishing his own, launching hybrid commercial exposition projects of many varieties, studying art and cultural commerce and management, engaging in attaching discourses, and experimenting with innovative, creative approaches for showing, thinking about and distributing art.

IC

Proposition 4D will stipulate the form of immediately selling the remaining, available artwork of the 4D VyNIL series, which is its greater proportion for a pre-set fee ($45000); designate a resale percentage fee (10%) that will be remitted to the artist upon the buyer(s) selling of the art, in whole or parts; map additional conditions benefiting all stakeholders through the establishment of an Estate/Foundation operating on behalf of the art and artist, heirs, selling partners, etc.

NOTES:

This project will be framed as a standalone artwork itself, connecting to but distinct from the objects in the 4D VyNIL series. The author/originator of Proposition 4D (Paul McLean) is also its “artist.” The structure of the Prop4D exchange addresses significant design changes in the art economy, since 1980. In 2018, as in 2008 and the aftermath of that Crash, calls to reform the art market have generated little or no meaningful concessions from the most powerful players in the field. Sensible solutions are readily available, but almost certainly will cause major disruption of existing hierarchies in cultural economies. Change and growth must occur, and the question is whether the change manifests incrementally and rationally, or chaotically, as in violent fracture. I think the central point is the value of expression in society, and the best nature of expression for us. The material aspect of art creation and craft is incomprehensible to anyone who has not had the good fortune to practice. Compensation for lifetime commitment to art, culture, democratic society is an indicator of civic health. Those who dismiss the utility of the artist to a system dependent on free speech for its survival deserve the reality they get. Current events in America are a clear demonstration of this last statement. Inhumanity is artless in the extreme, and cruelty is anti-art. In art, even a forgery tells the truth, in the end.

Socket [SOLD]

II PROSPECTUS

The gallery and/or dealer, or a syndicate of galleries and/or dealers will collaborate with the artist to properly place the work with appropriately engaged collectors, mount exhibitions, establish institutional programming and publish related documentation and supporting materials and texts. The keyword is commitment.

IIA

The sequence for management and development of the work follows the recognizable trajectory. The purchased work is organized and catalogued. Whenever possible, individual artworks or series and groups of artworks or a collection is sold to a viable clientele, or syndicate of clients. Every sales contract will include the assurance that the owner will permit exhibition of the painting or sculpture purchased upon request. 4D VyNIL and the associated art will be presented in multiple locations and types of venues over time.

IIB

The model for the proposed relationship of artist to representative(s) is based on successful examples from the 20th Century. Dominant models today (Supergalleries, art fair, multi-tiered exchanges, both virtual and brick’n’mortar, or hybrid, etc.) aggressively disrupt the former’s modus operandi, all-directionally. The development of New Media in conjunction with traditional formats for art enables an expanded creative platform and means of distribution. The projected representative must be competent across the spectrum of available market options.

IIC

The integration of the art with additional programming is essential. Advancing 4D systematically is vital to the total artist’s project. The value of this feature of Art for Humans is profound, extending beyond current circumstance. The opportunity to collaborate with practitioners from other disciplines presents the artist and the participants with novel applications for envisioning a shared future. Establishing an archive will be a priority, in the organizational structure of artistic production.

III ARTIST STATEMENT

An art form is an agreement, if the art is social, cultural, commercial. Art itself is none of these. The object of art can be formal, and simultaneously reject formalism, among other things. The artist, likewise, can promote the exchange of his art for production purposes, and as an extension of civic freedom. The environment for art is rarely conducive to subtlety. The community for art is seldom supportive of artistic liberty. The issue is the sequence of transactions, in the interests of practicality and prioritization. Management of art is flatly an oxymoron. Yet here we are.

The disintegration of equitable public-private systems, including one for art, is accelerating and reaching critical mass. Although one can always find a barker or rube who defends the status quo at all costs, as long as the paychecks arrive more or less on time, the erosion of reasonable and enlightened exchange for all is everywhere evident. At such times, an artist is no less responsible than any other citizen in defense of democracy. What are artists doing? Critique, parody and irony are more useless than art, in opposition to tyranny. The pursuit of happiness seems a ludicrous response, but it is not. Insistence on the value of art is never wrong.

But the predicament is dimensional. The monopoly players in the 1% art market have co-opted the valuation of art from the democracy. Nothing new about this state of affairs ~ art is essential to human society, and anyone who wishes to control his fellows must command the terms by which art is recognized and exchanged on a macro-scale. Even if we have historical references for free, democratic art, it is up to us to demand it now.

[WIP]

No Place Like Home [Be Smart]

PART TWO

Smart Home #6 / 1200 x 1200 pixels

1

The consumer technology industry conducted a wide and broad push to sell the Smart Home concept. The foundation for the campaign in part was a massive shift to Cloud computing. The Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Driverless Vehicles, Drone Delivery Systems, Google Glass and so on, are initiatives backed by fortunes networked into syndicates to establish tech-visionary futures IRL. The creation of these pervasive dimensional systems to some extent requires the displacement of preexisting systems. For example, the Constitutional guarantees of privacy are an impediment to free data exchanges upon which the data-extraction/-exploitation models of the current monopolies and many networked companies depend. Deals are being forged among and between wealthy, powerful conglomerates and governments, components of which are projects that may define how much of the developed world operates. Key aspects of the negotiations include communications and media systems, electronic infrastructure, cybersecurity, national and international regulations on multiple fronts, profit and cost distributions, definitions of labor, energy allotments and so on. Most critical are understandings on public and private domain.

2

The inversion of the domestic is a defining characteristic of the era. Home is a complex formulation for the creation of individuality, in its relations to ascending orders of collectivity. The ideal home is a construct that drives much of the modern imagination and is essential to the realization of “the American Dream.” Magazines and media programs are devoted to the subject. Significant portions of the market economy are driven by home purchase, furnishing, maintenance and fueling. The configuration of family to fit the conception of a “perfect home” bends the imaginary toward familial and domestic benchmarks that are at the least difficult to attain. The images propagated into the perceptual media flow defining our families and homes are problematic and require substantial critique to parse, much less validate. The wild claims of the futurists in domestic network technologies regarding the value of IoT and Smart Homes etc. echo those for time-saving devices of post-War/mid-century appearing in ads on TV and in daily or monthly periodicals, appealing to house wives and their well-employed husbands. The question is, to whom, exactly are these new shouts for adopting the latest home-focused consumer technologies meant to appeal?

For the artist, there are many Home-focused considerations, some of which are shared with one’s neighbors; others are aesthetic, and these can be brought to bear on the range of social, economic, political issues that are relevant across the populations of one’s house or building, neighborhood, town, city, county, state, nation and world. An art active in the home is one that, via the web, can ripple throughout the perceptual fabric of humanity, as never before. The sustainability of that phenomenon is uncertain. This is a rich field, the art of Home. For one example of so many, check out Isaac Layman at Elizabeth Leach Gallery this month. A 2017 documentary that speaks to so many points identified with contemporary artist-home dynamics is The Secret Life of Lance Letscher. Whatever one’s identity/profile, most likely there is an artist reference that qualifies as a model for Home-oriented material (and immaterial). Given the extent to which the borders separating norms and margins in our social domestic narrative have blurred or even evaporated, the content for one to fabricate an imaginary for HOME to conform to preference and urge is practically unlimited. “Everything is permitted” - but the question remains, is this notion derivative of Corinthians, Nietzsche, Assassin’s Creed, or any others on the long list of people who have abandoned the dictates of conformity? Artists, or the romantic version of avant garde artist, are vested with super-powered permissiveness by which creative liberation is vested. LoL.

Linda #10 (2001, PJM)

3

Again, all of these projects for Home and home consciousness are fictional. Lest the reader need be reminded, the Crash of 2007-8 and consequent great recession were predicated on the sub-prime real estate loan market and the derivatives attaching. That in some measure is the accepted narrative. What is also true is the re-distribution of wealth from all economic cohorts to the tiny fraction of “high net worth” families and individuals at the pinnacle of that Cartesian model plus the minion class for the fractional winners. The correlation is complex, with plausible deniability present in all rationalizations. Austerity as a remedy for the crises was prescribed by economists enlisted by and from the minion class for the super rich. Sometimes the super rich themselves lambasted the “takers” classes. The disharmony among the stories and images assembled to justify policy, proposed solutions, and visions of socioeconomic reconciliation in the aftermath of the most massive (global) redistribution of wealth and property have forced extreme approaches into the mainstream (witness the Trump phenomenon). Fakery is a 4dimensional marker now, in civil - and uncivil - discourse. The thin veil hiding the wizardry facilitating the consolidation of power and capital in the possession of the few over the many is dissolving. Now what?

“Manhood” ~ small screen video for mobile device accessed via QR code during “A New Dimension” exhibit opening at Silver Shed, Chelsea/NYC (2011)

So much of the critical and curatorial action since Occupy avoids confrontation with the rich and powerful collectors who benefit most from the reformation of the international art economy over the past several decades, which parallels and reflects the macro- trends in the global order. Embracing a narrow band of acceptable parameters for “art” that addresses the Problem. In “A New Dimension” at Silver Shed in 2011, I presented over two dozen original videos that were Internet accessible via QR codes were posted on web pages, throughout the exhibit space, and elsewhere (through posted flyers, invitations, ads, downloads and so on). A linked platform of web pages and blogs were created or dedicated to the exhibition, which mirrored or counterbalanced another 4D project, Gramatica Parda, which took place in LA the previous year. In the content of the production, the blend of artists and themes illustrate the range of options available to confront the Ogre of the status quo. I chose Michael Bloomberg, then Mayor of NY, as my 1%er boogeyman. Keep in mind, this was pre-OWS. Over the 8 years I lived and worked in NYC, the relationship of artists to power clarified dramatically. Hilariously, the critical tactic of blaming the victim/killing the messenger (i.e., Zombie Formalism) gained traction in top-shelf anti-aesthetic threads. The methods employed in promulgating the ZF meme are typical of those used in almost every industrial press to justify the radical process by which power aggregates authority in media.

Animation still for Vide01 for “A New Dimension” (2010, PJM)

4

The brutal, banal actuality is that many novelties in artist praxis are non-verbal submissive displays directed at the powerful collector, the institutions and businesses that cater to them and the media that serves them. Pop-up shows are not interventions. They are necessary due to the oppressive conditions governing spatial allocations for public, cultural production. The location of artist activity on the web, at home, in transitional zones are not conceptual alternatives, for the most part. They are responses to increasing restrictive tendencies in society. The instances of outrageous gratification, such as artists selling sex to collectors for cash and coverage, are not viable as meaningful resistance. They indicate compliance. Cowardice is not artistic, and cowardice in 2018 is found throughout the art economies, educational complex, governmental administration for arts and cultural, the art press, and the massive ranks of self-identified and professional artist. Cowardice is also profusely located in the people who opt out of support for free expression and instead permit the wholesale co-optation of democratic society by “free” markets and those few they are meant to serve.

Smart Home #8 (PJM, 2018)

No Place Like Home

PART ONE

“Coal Tipple, WV” (PJM, 1986); photographed on the back porch of the family home by the artist’s father.

1

Home is the main circuit of my art. It has been that way from the get-go. Home is the prime 4D concept, and can transform casually or causally into the art’s medium, the architecture, the studio, content, framing and more. The philosophy for art is shaped by home. Home is potentially the central marketplace for art, and its concrete destination, or at least a station at which the object art pauses its movement, and the idea art is envisioned. The definition of home is extensive and can encompass the metaphysical and the geological meaning, as well as the political, communal or social. Home, since the advent of the personal computer and the ubiquitous wired network device has blurred and morphed to become to variable degree virtual. In its absence or negation, home is the nexus for the modern issue, the focal discourse of value orientation, the core of identity and its lack. The correlation between home and sexuality has never been more profound and complex. All these conditions for home - and there are abundantly more, including excess writ large - swell and diminish in the tides of one’s and the collective attention matrix. The circumstances of unfolding modernity enforce the power of the home to map the significance of people, from birth to death and beyond. Home ultimately is the modulation between permanence and the temporary, material and immaterial, memory and loss. Home is a key to human relations, and this is undeniable, for the nomad or the native.

VIDEO [“Come Home” (Description ca. 2006 from the AFH YouTube channel)] ~ “An installation element for ‘Seven Episodes: A Unifying Dream Interrupts Causality :: The Casualty Animates the Space’” ~ Notes from Artist Statement: "Seven Episodes" is a 4D production, and the fourth in a cycle of exhibits ("A Prayer For Clean Water") presented in installations, lectures and performance in Austin, Texas, at St. Edward's University and Shady Tree Studios, October through December 2005. Information about the Austin project can be found on my website. "Seven Episodes" features new works I've completed since arriving at CGU, as well as purchased, "found", re-contextualized and appropriated objects and elements. "Seven Episodes" also presents creative contributions from DddD collective artists (01 SlewCrew AFH) Seth Strope, Sean Gaulager, Shane Kennedy, Max Abrams, Adam Cotton and model.

Armory Show booth 2001 (PJM)

2

In a few days, in early December, the “art world” converges on Miami for the fairs. The art fairs of the past several decades have substantially reformatted most art markets, but especially the fine art, contemporary, global, high net worth marketplace. The change in prime venue for art has coincided with other important trends - political, economic, cultural and especially technological. Not surprisingly, the type of art and artist that generates market success, and the support that success attaches, has evolved. The globalist shift for art since the second World War means that a manufactured Chinese art market parallels a Western art market that is rigged for ROI for its majority players in an undefined or -regulated scenario. The stakes for the institutions, businesses and individuals who dominate the main channels for art exchange have never been higher, as indicated by valuations. Yet, the narrative of booming commerce for international art is accompanied by the subtext of collapsing cultural infrastructure, precarity for the vast majority of the art-centric demographic, a diminishing art public and increasing resistance to the altering status quo. The most resonant protestation echoing through the art halls is the cry against inequality. The sustained noise in the distance is the rising fear of cataclysmic war and climate-caused catastrophe.

Still #33 from BONE series; manipulated digital photograph of LA Natural History Museum vitrine (PJM 2005, for Gramatica Parda at ANDlab, Los Angeles)

The phenomena outlined above have Home in common, although the dynamics of the domestic are inconsistent from thing to thing, point to point, image to image, person to person, place to place, and so on. If you ask someone, Where (or What) is your Home? - what is the answer, beyond a street address? What are real home economics, right now? In America, is Homeland Security a settled matter? If an energy company decides to construct a pipeline through your home, what recourse will you, your family and your community have, if you say no? Command and control for privacy and property is not a clarified hierarchy today, if ever it has been, at least not for everyone, even a conceptual Everyone. Whether the access to and freedom within your domestic space is enforced or undone by the government, a syndicate of corporations or yourself is an open question, we have discovered, and not through a free press, generally speaking, or not initially anyway. How safe are you in your residence? Does your notion of Home extend beyond the walls of the structure you inhabit (possibly a box, a tent or a car) to a yard, into the village, town, city, state, region, country, continent, planet you inhabit? Is your supposition of home contingent on race, family structure, religion, socialization, politics, economic class and whatever additional or other associative order pertains to you, beyond location, location, location? If home is a place, what else is it? How much of the rest of home does any of us get to choose or reject? Or will it be defined for us, through systematic superimposition?

Enamel on metal, hand-painted sign (PJM, 1998)

3

The first independent gallery project I launched was Freedom Gallery in my home town of Beckley, West Virginia in 1998. We survived a few months. The rent was minimal. The attendance for events and the foot traffic was a function of extended family connections, high school friendships, word of mouth, little blurbs in the local paper, flyers, a sign, pretty much what one would expect. I still have the hand-painted sign. My ideas about art and community are profoundly affected by the experiences that have accumulated over the decades at the cross-section of my Appalachian roots and my leaving and returning there, in no small measure due to my thinking about the place when I am absent. Collective and collaborative exhibitions like HOME01 and SEAM01 emerged directly from the connection to my mountain state home, even if the actual expositions incorporated a much broader conception of home and memory of home, since the source material came from a pool of artists’ contributions. “Where My Feet Stick to the Ground” and the other Scotland-focused shows, artworks and projects I’ve produced have their point of origin in my ancestry, which is to say, the home my ancestors left when they came to America. The ancestral home is a configuration that binds blood and bone to place with a history that is a task to maintain, much less recover, if it has been interrupted through generations, by trauma, displacement or other pressures. My first solo exhibit at Eidolon Gallery in Santa Fe, which happened roughly a decade after I completed undergraduate study, took on the divorce industry. In short, that show dealt explicitly with the wrenching effects of home dissolution, and the predatory apparatus contrived to consume those whose domestic life has failed.

McLean residence, circa 2008

I think there is a subtle logic that operates in my work, which has to do with the precept that a church is God’s house. Given my religious upbringing, it was inevitable. Frank Stella and others have poignantly written about the architecture of Western painting, about the centuries that painting served the Crowns of Europe and decorated the earthbound portals to the divine. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel was an important reference for my early work, but so was the reactionary, visionary production of van Gogh. Add to the mix the window/grids of the comics, the book illustrations that constituted my visual education in graphic imagination and the strange haloed projections of movies and light-emissions of television, and the platform for interpreting the sensations of my generation clarify. In essence, this combination of multimedia is the precursor of the Internet. Mine was the last cohort to experience the universe before it was compressed for mass dissemination through near total monopoly channels, and to witness the transfiguration of all language-based exchange into data packages. I chose in the early 90s to immerse myself in digital processes and media on a more or less equivalent basis with my artist practice.

Swimmer (PJM, 2003)

Launching the Art for Humans web platform was less a launch and more an incremental build. One inspiration I had for the network structure was the typical New Mexico barrio compound/home. The adobe haciendas that the nortenos constructed were additive, as in add a baby, add a room or a wing. The family expanded dimensionally. AFH grew along the same rhizomatic lines. Daily activity did involve filling pre-existing structures with content; translating analog data to digital formats and archiving them transparently. The long-term aggregate effect seemed to align gracefully with modular design aesthetics. Reflecting on the AFH program, now in its third decade, I marvel at our naivete, and work ethic. If you think of program components as building blocks or links, it’s easy with hindsight to see how dependence on anything that could be consumed by what would become the powerhouses in the field was a weak org-design element. Autonomy over time is terribly important for technical reasons, but it is a key determinant in how one survives.

Spash page for AFH Gallery Online, circa 2005.

The virtual AFH, during healthy phases, was nicely harmonized with actual AFH. The promise of the web in the late 90s and into the mid-00s is hard to remedy with the shitty version that exists now. A home page in that brief period could be as sexy as a custom paint job in California car culture Classic era. A web site could be a smack in the chops or an epic adventure. The best ones were a bit of both. It was possible to spend the same time and energy constructing a net-based production as one might invest building a brick and mortar home or facility and/or undertaking a commercial venture or starting a family. What many of us failed to understand was the fragility of the medium. A prime characteristic of the virtual thing is its likelihood of disappearance. While this characteristic applies to the actual thing, too, the time frame is very different. Virtual and actual decay or decomposition both stink, if it’s your entity that’s dissolving. A virtual crash can be like a light switch turned off.

“Where My Feet Stick to the Ground” installation view [Peanut Gallery, Nashville, TN (1996)]

The Home Show in Astoria is a natural crescendo in the arc of this thread in my art. It allocates the proper distance to the subject, and the duration makes sense. As a concrete exposition, the display of vinyl paintings is coherent enough to establish conformity within the building. The art and architecture seem fitted, not contrived. The exhibition meshes with contemporary art protocols for emotional neutrality in the white cube. In its first stage, Home Show reintroduces moving image and web-based elements, affording the paintings their moment to project into the environment without media interference and distraction. In future iterations, there very well may be media assets and 3D objects that interact within a presentation environment for 4D VyNIL. For now, however, that is only an idea in an imaginary, formative incarnation.

JP’s backyard, 2009 (PJM)

HOME SHOW #1

INSTALLATION PHOTOS [Session 1] >

AFH UPDATE [November 2018]

OBLIGATORY PR

November 19

Art for Humans and Good Faith Space are pleased to announce “HOME SHOW #1,” an exhibit of paintings by Astoria, Oregon artist Paul McLean. The show will feature artwork from McLean’s 4D VyNIL series, completed between 2017-18 in Brooklyn, New York. The vinyl paintings on canvas, wood panel, paper and vinyl records will be installed in the artist’s Astoria home, for viewing on Saturdays November 24 and December 1, from 1-5PM. Light refreshments will be served.

Paul McLean, ca. 2001

Paul McLean has been a professional artist for thirty-five years. He has exhibited in galleries, museums, educational and cultural institutions, arts foundations and alternative art spaces. McLean has served as Lead Artist for art collectives and participated in many multidisciplinary creative collaborations. His art craft extends to camera- and computer-based production for still and moving images and printed matter plus online graphics. McLean has maintained an internet-based platform (Art for Humans) since the late 1990s, and has been an early adopter of digital processes throughout his career. McLean has given numerous lectures, artist talks, contributed in panel discussions, published texts, and been the subject of art press features. He hosted art talk radio programs in Santa Fe and Nashville. His theoretical focus is 4th dimensional art and systems. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (BA), holds Masters degrees in Fine Arts and Arts Management from Claremont Graduate University and the Drucker School. McLean is currently undertaking doctoral work commenced at the European Graduate School in 2010. The paintings in “HOME SHOW #1” are thesis art for the artist’s doctorate candidacy. McLean was born in Beckley, West Virginia. He and his family recently relocated to Astoria from Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY.

PAUL MCLEAN’S CURRICULUM VITAE > https://www.ox4dafh.com/pjm-cv/

“HOME SHOW #1” LOCATION > 725 11th Street / Astoria, OR / 97103

• To preview the art that will be on view during “HOME SHOW #1,” visit the Paul McLean’s catalog website (www.goodfaithspace.com) and his nexus site (www.mysticnovad.com).

• Updates and more info are also available on AFH social media (www.facebook.com/artforhumans and www.instagram.com/valubl).

To contact the artist, phone 615.491.7285 or email art@artforhumans.com. You can also RSVP to Lauren at (916) 206-6564 or email laurengmclean@gmail.com.

Gallery One > HOME SHOW series #1-49

Astoria, OR

DISCLAIMER

I am composing what follows during Mercury Retrograde. I have a head cold. I recently quit smoking. If the text fails, and is incomprehensible, I attribute that failure at least in part to these conditions and circumstances, and beg the readers’ forbearance. As it is, the text certainly lacks a focus beyond the loose idea of Home, and the event that is slated for the next two weekends, “HOME SHOW.” The narrative loops in several temporal and spatial zones. The illustrations perhaps are meant to tie the author’s ideas together, but potentially add to the readers’ confusion. Well, at least the weather has been nice!

Astoria, OR and the Columbia River

CONTEXT (Speculative Artist Statement)

1

I’m operating on instinct here. That’s the big takeaway. It’s taken a few months - meaning, nearly a year - to get a handle on the Valubl Project, as it is manifesting, or emerging, and whatnot. Our relocation from Bushwick to Astoria [OR], and the manner of that intranational migration’s unfolding, have in certain aspects exposed a rather magical nature within the progression of events. Magic is a blending substance. I think this is especially true, given the historical moment. The nicely ordered sequence [LoL, in retrospect] of our arrival/moving into the Astoria house, the fast-paced but organic acquisition of new relationships, fostering an incremental integration into this vibrant community… I’ve only partially projected these matters into social media channels. The narrative, the adventure, is happening outside the sharing networks, I suppose because I am being protective over it, or at least reserved about it. Although I am I would say transmitting enough of it in code, as a form of poetic fiction, narrowly dispersed. What is the strategy, if that is the tactic? It’s a function of being done with the current mode of discourse, the mandatory fixations, and the saturating quality of all-directional messaging that predominate most through-puts. I mean, I’m certainly not beyond a good rant, but I also realize the efficacy of public chatter at this point is minimal. To pursue healthy, democratic activities outside of the catastrophic miasma engulfing the “world,” the “country,” the “people,” is to do so absent the expectation of attention, openness, receptivity and with a realistic assessment of resource availability. Art, in this context, is a Chimera.

IMMATERIAL (Prospectus)

2

The transitional or interstitial situation of our Astoria house at 725 11th presents an excellent opportunity to install and exhibit the first two phases of the 4D VyNIL paintings in a residential, domestic structure. A house like those I grew up in, that my granny and aunties occupied. My “exhibit design” is inspired by foggy memories of those relatives’ homes, or rather, of my feelings about those places, as they exist in my memory, now. Who knows how much any of my recall is real. It’s ghosts, memories & shades of memories. I should mention that the HOME SHOW program is also linked to the revival of an AFH social media platform, coinciding with the production of the 4D VyNIL series. (Anecdotally) we noticed that posting pictures of folks collecting the new pieces, hanging them in their offices or homes, attracted a bunch of “LIKE” and “LOVE” and “WOW” clicks from the AFH virtual community! I guess that trend registered somewhere in the noodle, and helped activate the conceptual machinery that eventually builds a quasi-orthodox artsy exposition, like HOME SHOW.

Photo + handwritten caption : Dr. William David McLean (RIP); posted to the Instagram of John David McLean; light digital editing by PJM ~ SUBJECT: 217 Granville Avenue, Beckley, West Virginia (ca. 1976); Mrs. McLean pictured; Christmas decoration design by Dr. McLean, with contributions by John, Paul, Marc & Lois McLean.

The weird thing is the Astoria house and the vinyls seem to have been fitted for one another, which is odd because the paintings were executed in Brooklyn in the AFH Studios in Williamsburg and transported to yonder Astoria (Oregon, not Queens). Prior to our arrival, I had only seen the house through JPEGs and during a couple of cursory walk-throughs with our awesome landlord Tad.

4D VyNIL paintings installed in clients’ home (2017)

For perspective > In the past, I’ve worked from intricately detailed exhibit schematics for installations in galleries and institutions. That’s not a description of our “Home Show #1” modus operandi at all, though by all appearances it may as well have been. More or less, I have enough wall space to hang every art work - a rarity. If this were a fictional narrative, I would say we have an anomalous premise, possibly suggestive of unbound precognition or prefiguration, or as a Celt would put it, Second Sight. Aggregating these impressions I’m outlining, to frame this particular, original Valubl enterprise in its initial stage as anything other than dreamy is starch. I’d be happy to pretend that converting our new place into a temporary gallery space was the plan all along, but that’s not true. What is true is there is no plan, as such. [From The Way of the Gun (in clip ~ :50) > Parker: I think a plan is just a list of things that don't happen.] Still, in a parallel formula or zone, maybe as an unconscious mechanism or subliminal function, yes, Home Show #1 is the stuff of Destiny.

LOGISTICS (Formal Analysis)

3

Our new home is a hundred+ year-old former Presbyterian rectory, and features a first floor with a spacious room for entertainment and a dining room, a large kitchen and hutch and a half bathroom. The second floor contains bedrooms, bathrooms and lots of fixed storage. There is an attic and a basement, both of which have good features. The attic has views of the Columbia River and downtown Astoria, and the basement is big and rigged for light industry, plus more storage. Given the history of our home, what little we know of it, we are still safe in our assessment that the architecture was never specifically dedicated to the exhibition of art, and definitely not contemporary art, as such. Yet, the structure does offer some allowances for the purpose of fine art display, such as the hanger ledges in the upper moldings of the living room. Previous tenants had used various types of hanging devices in wall surfaces; however, we don’t know exactly what they exhibited. To summarize, we have traces of the artifacts that previous occupants placed throughout the building, but nothing concrete.

My friend’s tipi (New Mexico, 2001; 35mm slide)

Notation: A “brick and mortar” construct juxtaposes permanence and the temporary simultaneously, and therefore is inherently 4D. Adding virtuality to the structure in a simulated present (a presence) only enhances the dimensionist quality of the Art Home, or any other metaphorical kind of domicile. The “Home Show #1” project has me thinking about the myriad projects that artists have undertaken in which home is a central component. Artists show in homes when other exhibition avenues are inaccessible for whatever reasons. For some artists, home itself is the subject, and for others the artist at home is the subject. The links between painting and sculpture and residential architecture are ancient, if one considers a cave naturally architectonic. But how relevant is home to art, now? The ratio of people able to own homes is fast diminishing. The loss of the dream of a family home is contiguous with the loss of the dream of family. And remember the significance of the “Home Page?” What does that term signify in the so-called post-internet era? Should we accept that a virtual home is simply a figure of speech?

Duart Castle (1995, PJM)

The castle as “big house” incorporates the notion of domesticated art utilized for the arc of civilization with its identified property (e.g., Windsor Castle). Art inside the house rationalizes the property itself. Just as the museum rationalizes the civilization. In America we have cultivated tremendous diversity for art within buildings, as a direct consequence of free speech. Any citizen can show whatever she likes within the confines of her property, regardless of standards of taste or decency, and nobody can do a damn thing about it! Is this a good or bad thing? Well, I would argue the conversation about whether it’s a good or bad thing is a good thing! The binary critique (good/bad) is effectually and permanently discredited, and moving forward, in the 4D perceptual field, the alternatives (to good/bad) and range of critical categories are infinite. [MILO: So… inside/ outside the four walls of the sure thing/ we will all have to negotiate for asylum/ & navigate the ravages unleashed upon us/ in every direction. / The distinction between windows and mirrors will blur. ]

HOME 01, 2001 [PJM; 6” x 6” digital output on 3M adhesive-backed film, A/P]

CONCEPT (Proposition)

4

Is there a unified or definitive concept of Home today?

“HOME” is a subject that has been a consistent driver in my work, research and theory. I think the same is true for most artists. Nowadays, the corrosion of domestic security for almost everyone is the common thread shared by the great proportion of mankind. The mind of home and family in the West is dominated since the 20th Century by psychology and its affiliates sociology and anthropology. These disciplines, if that is what they are, usurped the territory from religion, but also the various mandates of formal relations delivered via economic, political, social, tribal/geographic constituency. It is, however, patently insufficient to blame the now-ancient campaign of dislocation and disconnection on these recent soft-target newbies, regardless of their contributions to world suffering.

“Freud” > Not an Artist series (2006); MGT/MFA Project

To say that nearly nowhere and for only the few is home life in its dimensional aspects stable, secure, safe. How this scenario came to pass is a question endlessly pondered, but rarely with any viable solutions entertained, and nearly never are culprits properly identified by name, location and occupation, in conjunction with intentions of thorough and properly severe justice rendered.

“Mound of Buffalo Skulls” > Animation still (#205) ~ CONTENT 5, Sequence 12; To view the series of animation cells, click HERE.

Art and artists are certainly engaged with the phenomenon, but it is difficult to see how the artistic is any better a platform for confronting the many crises attaching to home than public policy, journalism, academia, media and so on. Art, due to obvious conflicts of interest, often must recuse itself from the forum. I refuse the route of capitulation, because I have not lost hope in the anonymous, untitled artistic urge to contradict the destructive and enslaving capacity in humankind, most poignantly expressed in the act of creating art, despite environmental madness of all descriptions and traps of conscription at every turn. If there is apparently no home possible anymore I will paint paintings that the Universe will insist be provided a home.

HOME is central to some of the big global, cultural, economic and political issues of our day, such as immigration, climate change, gender (roles), identity, inequality, occupation and mass destruction. The “art world” exists, at least at its pinnacle, on an axis that spans institutions, intermediary zones and the “homes” of collectors. Art migrates from public to private space via market paths, black/white/gray scale. Evidence of art migration is to some extent projected through legacy and new media, as well as through the dedicated communication channels employed by the powerful to do what they do in the spheres in which they operate.

“Movin’ Out of Bushwick, 2018” (PJM)

The super rich and powerful tend to maintain multiple homes and procure properties to suit their activities. The connection between home and art is at that level the binding stipulation of property, of ownership, of possession. The nature of class circularity revolves around the proposition that one’s possessions define one, and that one acquires one’s possessions through programmatic action and/or inheritance, and sometimes luck. The 4D VyNIL series is an answer to the question of Home, and in its dimensional qualities activates the conversations I believe are most important about home, about art, about the future of both as embodied in the artist, and projected through his vision. The Home question, particularly as it pertains to art, is then a discussion about survival, one in which I am prepared to engage.

Jon Randall performing at HOME01. Margaret Tolbert paintings in the background ~ at ruby green Contemporary Arts Foundation (Nashville, 2001)

5

PRECURSORS (History)

Home, I guess obviously, was the central theme for “HOME01,” a complex [01] collective exhibit with several phases and multiple performances launched in 2001 at ruby green Contemporary Arts Foundation in Nashville. The first stage of “HOME01” presented a curated expo for Gainesville, FL artists. The curating duties were undertaken in a collaborative spirit, shared among Virginia Cannon, the artists and myself. The program promoted the value of geo-cultural exchange. The second and third phases involved re-hanging the gallery with artwork by the 01 collective. It is difficult to summarize content of “HOME01.” Each participant was invited to undertake and present work that dealt with “home,” in its dimensional conception, and/or as a visceral, experiential phenomenon. The 01 collective consisted of artists, academics, writers, dancers, musicians, architects, scientists, healing arts practitioners, filmmakers, technologists and more. The range of expression and consideration the collective brought to the task was profound.

Invitation for the 2001 H0ME01 project

I think I’ll leave off a comprehensive review of HOME01 for another day, and simply copy a few paragraphs from the proposal submitted to ruby green for the project’s approval. Photo documentation for HOME01 is HERE at AFH Flickr.

Exhibit Concept "Home" is a three-phase exhibit, featuring new and preexisting work by contemporary artists based in Nashville, Gainesville, Florida and New York City, New York. These artists represent a broad range of disciplines, including traditional 2D and 3D object-based media, New Media (Internet, digital media, video and audio), architecture, graphic design, performance and installation media. Some will contribute elements to the exhibit, which might be described as found objects. These elements will further elucidate the exhibit concept.

The exhibit structure will consist of a three-phase installation and four Live Art events. The installation will change each week, in order to provide the artwork exhibited with adequate presentation space and focus, and to encourage viewers to return to the exhibit more than once. The Live Events will consist of lectures, multi-media presentations, performances and a fashion show. These events will serve as artists' receptions, entertainment and fundraising opportunities.  

The concept for the exhibit is "Home". Each participating artist will produce new or pre-existing work, which will explore some aspect of this concept. The correlation of the work to the concept will be overt and direct in some cases, and more subjective and oblique in others. The interpretive diversity within the exhibited collection is a function of the freedom of vision afforded the participating artists and the conceptual agenda of the curator.

Erin Hewgley > HOME01 : “Blended Family” / Performance and installation [ruby green Contemporary Arts Foundation (Nashville, 2001)]

For an expanded textual description of HOME01, click on the title block (the hot link that says “Show more” below the set title). There you’ll find the general project outline, timeline of events, list of participants and more conceptual description, plus acknowledgements, attributions, etc. Holy cow. When I reviewed that doc, I was blown away by the ambition of this program, the quality of the creatives involved, the diversity of work shown and shared, and the complexity of the production machinery. I do want to drill down into that as a project, since the critical coverage I believe HOME01 warranted did not really exist for us, and hardly anywhere at the time. I submit that HOME01 represents an important episode in a lost history for hybrid arts post-y2k. Consider that the exhibit cycle + its Live Art Events happened on an accelerated timeline, and was facilitated in large measure through the fluid collective network we called 01. The logistics of transporting the Gainesville artists’ work to Nashville, installing it and the prodigious media hardware utilized throughout the space and project, maintaining the complicated new media on display, coordinating performances and the openings, the receptions, the happenings, plus more, more, more. There was a lot of printed matter, on the walls, for invitations, for press. We furnished ruby green with cool furniture for a week. Garth Williams demonstrated the Myriad, still in my mind the baddest-ass Flash-based net.art ever created. Erin Hewgley in a school girl costume running a chain saw through couches and basically a complete two-part family living room suite, LIVE! We documented the hell out of it all, but compared to what it was like to be there? Pictures and videos only show so much. It was phenomenal. Really.

CONTENT: A Decade Since

Over the years I have been asked many times how artist “success” happens, by people who are curious, or who have aspirations to that end, for themselves or someone else on whose behalf they will inquire. The so-called art world’s processes to many are opaque. I can share anecdotally on that subject.

Preparing Yarger|Strauss for “CONTENT”

1

It's been a decade since I launched the 4D/multimedia exhibit "CONTENT" at Timothy Yarger Fine Art in Beverly Hills. Then it was called Yarger|Strauss. The show opened the week of the Crash - September 18, 2008. The exhibit culminated a sequence/series of installations and projects that included Content productions at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown (LA) and my MFA thesis show at Claremont Graduate University, plus online iterations, texts and media. I feel like it's a good time to revisit that work, which, due to the externalities/environmental circumstances, was subsumed in the panic and chaos of the moment.

Lula #21 (24” x 24” digital Mimaki Hi-res UV print on acrylic)

The sequence of events that culminated in the Yarger|Strauss exhibit unfolded over a span of several years. I visited a friend in SoCal who lived in a cabin on Mt. Baldy. One evening we ventured into an Inland Empire town (I forget which one) and I saw a combination of media that I had not encountered outside one of my own collective or solo projects. In the early 00s much of the art market was resistant to what would commonly be termed New Media. However, many artists were enthusiastic about combining and integrating disciplines and technologies, analog and digital processes, 2-3D materials and approaches. The blurring of lines between theory and things in the art context was being pushed by virtuality in myriad directions and ways. I noticed indications that LA was a fertile territory for what I define as 4D practice. The proximity of the moving image industry to Silicon Valley, the presence of a relatively robust Contemporary Art scene and market, and the abundance of (art) schools were a few markers I considered. Coming from Santa Fe/Nashville/Austin with a good dose of NYC, the emerging field in LA was more impressive the deeper my research drilled. Rosamund Felsen at that time represented Pat O’Neill, who possessed massive film credentials and skills, and whose interests encompassed gallery practice. I read a very exciting essay about one of his shows, and paid a visit to Felsen’s Bergamot Station venue to meet both Pat and Rosamund and view the work in person. I had brief conversations with the artist and the dealer. In the latter case, I told Felsen I was thinking of making a run at the LA art scene. She recommended I get an MFA at one of the programs in and around the city. That’s what I did.

Animated Patterns by Paul McLean Audio by Max Abrams

My friend’s father (Walter Mix) was an accomplished painter and well-respected instructor. He directed me to visit with a friend of his who was still on the faculty at Claremont Graduate University (Michael Brewster). After an amicable interview, I applied to CGU and was accepted. I proceeded to obtain a Masters in Fine Art, and continued on to obtain a Masters in Arts Management through a new program at CGU’s Drucker/Ito School of Management. While an MFA student, I ran into a Nashville acquaintance (Bryson Strauss) at an art store in LA. During our exchange, Bryson told me about his venture with Tim Yarger and asked to see my new work. I invited him to the campus and my studio, and he was very enthusiastic about the pieces I showed him. We stayed in touch and Bryson followed my progress. He especially liked the Mimaki prints I produced in the summer between my first and second years, which I exhibited at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown. He returned to preview my thesis show with Tim and they offered me a show on the spot, and took some of the Mimaki Pattern series with them! In a few months “CONTENT” would be installed and on display at Yarger|Strauss in Beverly Hills, next to Sotheby’s…

2

The “art” that would appear in “CONTENT” - in my 4D aesthetic schema - is not really Art at all. The title of the series of five exhibits, plus media and projects - CONTENT - reflects the trend to displace art and disrupt its place in the cultural hierarchy with a generic term that applies to a vast aggregate of diverse material and immaterial products and productions. Content and context are intermingling across the demarcations of so-called Old Media and yielding stuff that includes hybrids, simulations, reproductions, etc. In the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, I endeavored to directly confront this phenomenon in my thesis work and its derivatives. The objects, images (still & moving) and audio I would integrate in CONTENT 1-5 would represent “the tip of the iceberg” of my findings, emerging from the research and practices undertaken in the course of my MFA, plus the projects - like AFH Gallery Online/Chinatown. Which brings us to a juncture at which art and tech talk converge. For most people, both art talk and tech talk cause one’s eyes to glaze, and the average person beyond this point will be doubly bored. Significant differences between art and tech talk exist. The most important, I would say, is that eye-glazing tech talk tries to explain how technology works. Eye-glazing art is designed to put the normal individual in a catatonic state, or in a visceral state of repulsion, or in a state of resigned disinterest. Tech talk generally speaking is made by techies whose intention is to explain how technology works, its function. Art talk generally speaking is made by non-artists whose desire is to obfuscate, minimize or divert the listener or reader from any actual function for art. To put it another way, art talk pretends to define or describe the “WHY” of art, and fails. Technologists can communicate with equally good technologists about the technology they share and be understood. This is rarely true for artists, unless they (the artists) talk about the craft aspect of what they do, in which instance they are in fact discussing art technology.

My CGU studio, circa 2006

With this assertion in mind, I’ll continue. Parallel to the narrative about how CONTENT at Yarger|Strauss materialized and/or manifested is another narrative. Simultaneous to the unfolding story of this artist’s having a solo show in Beverly Hills blue-chip gallery - a signifier of “success” in the art world by most art professional standards is the story of Art for Humans’ “success” as a platform by and for art/artists, with additional social media applications. The AFH platform by 2008 annually reached or was consumed by hundreds of thousands of users (and bots). The content posted on the sites in the AFH constellation or network of web portals (altogether) generated hundreds of thousands of downloads. The AFH platform consisted of multiple proprietary blogs created/using a variety of software/formats, a wiki, archives for still/moving images and illustrated texts, net.art, social media (which was a shiny new invention), and more. I developed a solid practicum for systematically toggling between analog art production and digital “art” systems. My 4D methodology enabled this. Unfortunately, six years after 010101/Art in Technological Times (SFMoMA, 2001), the art world writ large was still mostly confused by the mashup of art and technology. Linking dozens of tumblrs to twitter via twitterfeeds and SEO and amassing thousands of friends on MySpace, etc., to create a media channel that serviced brick and mortar art industry, propagated real time artistic collaboration, distributed artist-produced content, provided ample context for actual art operations, dispersed ideas globally with unprecedented speed, and did all of this exciting stuff and more outside cultural regulatory regimes not only was now possible, but I was doing it, and doing it on a relatively minuscule budget. And none of any of this fit very comfortably in the high-end art market retail gallery setting.

CONTENT 3, ART FOR HUMANS GALLERY CHINATOWN (2007)

What to do? The conundrum of meshing web-based and computer-generated creative practice plus collective work with the typical sales model of a Beverly Hills art gallery in the mid- to late 00s required some mapping the sweet spot in a field of Value + Means/Meaning + Values. The cultures, the modes, of the “New” and “Established” would have to be meshed, but how? I love such problems, because the solutions can be applied beyond the parameters of the art thing. The lead-up to CONTENT at Yarger|Strauss and internal reviews afterwards did involve a fair amount of communication on these issues. I would love to tell you that the outcome was marvelous, but the truth is the enterprise was flummoxed by the tsunami-like onset of the Great Recession, which rushed over us the week of the opening of the exhibit. For context: Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy the weekend of September 13-14, pitching the financial sector into a panic. Those were scary and grim moments for everyone, but for a certain sliver of the art markets, the fear was palpable. Deals were crushed. For example, a Lehman employee only a few weeks prior had approached Yarger|Strauss to arrange the installation of several Lula and Pattern series Mimaki prints in the LA Lehman offices. I insisted they be purchased and not rented, no matter the “exposure” value. A few weeks later Lehman was gone. Who knows what would have come of that deal (and the pieces) had the installation gone through. As opening evening for CONTENT neared, each day brought more bad economic news. The effect on the show was profound.

Installing Pattern series Mimaki prints at Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown (2007).

Even now, I find the memory of that time difficult to revisit. Although the accounts of the Crash of 2007-8 mark its beginning in December 2007, we had potential clients returning from the big European to-dos in Spring/Summer of that year (2007) refraining from purchases at AFHGC based on money manager advice, warning that a monumental shift in the markets was imminent. The phenomenon impaired the business model we had envisioned for that project. When sh*t really hit the fan, it was hard not to sink into despair, hard not to feel like the investments that I’d made to manifest CONTENT had been wasted, through the intervention of destructive forces outside the scope of our endeavor, economic conditions beyond our control. Many potent lessons arose from the experience, on the nature of art in relation to society at large. It’s important to recall that, prior to the downturn, the art world was booming at an unprecedented pace, and only a few players were sounding cautionary notes. It is sobering to look at that period, relative to what’s going on today. The consequences of the Great Recession on every aspect of American life continue to affect in our politics, culture and finances palpably.

CONTENT > MFA thesis exhibit at Claremont Graduate University (2007)

3

Turning to the art itself, I find the CONTENT exhibit a rich and inspiring mix of elements, ideas and technologies. Eventually, we chose to discard the paralleling virtual aspects of my practice and interests to focus on newly produced potentially salable objects, with a reduced sample of New Media, plus an introduction to my camera-based work. This decision was indicated by the gallery architecture, primarily. Integrating projections and monitor-based presentation with mostly light-reflective 2- and 3D pieces is, as anyone who has attempted to do so in a white cube scenario will likely attest, is complicated logistically. Projections and monitor-based images do best in darkened space as a rule. Light-reflective materials require proper lighting schemes and gear. Yarger|Strauss’s new gallery location was smaller than the previous iteration, with less open wall space. The Mimaki prints on acrylic are luminous, even jewel-like. They really pop!

“America,” the 6’ x 6’ entry piece and the largest object in the exhibit, pointed to a direction for the evolution of the CONTENT series that was conceived but never materialized (along with other elements in the presentation). The mix of photographic, digitized representation - and narrative - and repetitive, decorative patterning framing the image illustrated the possible configuration of stories embedded in visual components, a reference basic web design as well interior design. The patterns I was producing could be translated to both environments (web and architecture, interior and exterior), plus a plethora of objects. One of the cool features of the Mimaki printer I was BETA testing for Harvest Printing, which manufactured the Lula and Pattern series, was its capacity for output on shaped (3D) surfaces. My patterns, additionally, could translate to fabric design, for covering furniture, bodies, flatware, almost anything that can be printed upon or mechanically woven, utilizing new technologies. The upside was tremendous. This facet of CONTENT amounted to prototyping.

Shane Kennedy and I fiddling with the OpFeek installation in the Yarger|Strauss booth at LA Art Show (2007)

The (4D) experimental threads were developed in my MFA work and the AFH Gallery Chinatown were not foregrounded in the Yarger|Strauss iteration of CONTENT, but they were there. Initially Bryson and Tim were much enthused about OpFeek and the vinyl work I was producing in collaboration with Shane Kennedy, Jason Coulston, who at that time was co-owner of Pop Cling. We were creating beautiful vinyl wall pieces and using them as substrates for optical feedback performances and installations. Shane realized the form as we deployed it, in response to a specific 4D proposition. OpFeek was first deployed in-gallery at AFHGC, but Shane was doing some fantastic stuff projection-bombing around LA (e.g., on the Gehry Music Center facade at night). At CONTENT Y|G, this experimental seam was only cited in a small vinyl installed near the front door and desk of the gallery. At the behest of Tim and Bryson, we did present an OpFeek at LA Art Show in 2007, where the Y|G introduced my work in its booth. The presentation garnered interest from a spectrum of art fair attendees, including the venerable pop icon William Shatner (“Captain Kirk” of Star Trek fame).

5-17 [Surveillance Camera, OpFeek, Apple II Monitor and Pixel Painting Wall Elements] installation at AFH Gallery Chinatown by Shane Kennedy and Paul McLean (2007)

Shane and I were also conducting experiments using wall elements, surveillance equipment, OpFeek and an Apple II monitor, the first of which took place on 5-17/2007 at AFH Gallery Chinatown. The surveillance cam and Apple monitor were installed incorporated at CONTENT Y|G, minus the OpFeek component. The wall elements part was played primarily by “America” at the Y|G expo, and attendees provided the moving, interactive bodies. Other facets of the show at Yarger|Strauss: 13” x 19” portfolios of Pattern series and additional printed matter spanning my output from 2001-2008; Nashville series prints suspended on custom magnet/wire/steel presentation systems; animations and enhanced/manipulated videos projected on a screen, a wall, and presented on laptops and monitors in the space; new audio compositions by Max Abrams and myself. I designed and produced the identity materials for CONTENT (adhesive title blocks, invitations, poster, etc.), as well as a fairly extensive booklet and catalog accompanying the show. I also published a large volume of propaganda and documentation on the AFH platform, chronicling and expanding on the production and exhibition, plus the aesthetics underpinning them both. The gallery suggested that its website serve as the primary virtual entry point for CONTENT Y|G, and I deferred to them. Bryson had recently overhauled their web presence, and the Y|G site was very well done. Plus, it was a major buzz for me to be listed with artists like Picasso, Miro, Warhol and Chagall.

2 Women; Nashville series/portfolio, for CONTENT Y|G [19” x 13” Epson print on archival paper, unframed (2008)]

I approached the curatorial phase with Bryson and Tim wherever possible collaboratively. The exchange was almost entirely smooth and friendly. The stakes for us all were very high, and as outlined above, the environment for the show was chaotic, to say the least. Rarely did the tension caused by externalities affect our relationship. We did the best we could, and I think we did a great job under the circumstances! In the aftermath of CONTENT Y|G I can point to some things that didn’t happen that would have benefited the undertaking. For instance, we all tried hard through our respective networks to get the LA art press to review the show, but, for various reasons, that did not happen. In the postscript phase of the exhibition, Yarger|Strauss decoupled, and the gallery reverted to Timothy Yarger Fine Art. I finished my studies at CGU, applied for and was accepted to the European Graduate School media philosophy doctoral program, and subsequently moved to Bushwick. My experience with CONTENT Y|G (and the Crash) almost certainly contributed to my decision to join Occupy Wall Street and co-organize Occupy with Art several years later in the Fall of 2011.

Invitation to CONTENT at Yarger|Strauss (by PJM, 2008)

Happenings at Clatsop Community College [October 2018]

PART ONE

Painting by Joe Adams

I met accomplished NWC artist Joe Adams through mutual friends earlier this week, and he invited me to attend a presentation by Maori ceramicist collective Nga Kaihanga Uku at the Clatsop Community College on Thursday, October 18. The event was super, an all-afternoon affair, facilitated by Astoria ceramicist/CCC instructor Richard Rowland, who introduced the program. The Maoris shared slideshows consisting of photo, video and audio documentation of their homes, processes, finished work, exhibitions, and influences. The format was cultural and personal exchange, toggling from the academic routine to intensely personal descriptions of the artists relationships to colonial New Zealand history, indigenous life, the land, the media they used, and the internal methods by which these and other things (like family, gender, etc.) impacted their art.

Nga Kaihanga Uku (Photo by Joe Adams)

The Astoria/CCC-Maori/Nga Kaihanga Uku connection was established through programs in 2012 and 2015. It was clear that the ties between the are strengthening, becoming richer, more productive and generative, with each iteration. Joe had helped out with the production/firing of the clay created in the workshops, had friends among both crews, and made it very easy to meet the participants. I had a rollicking good chat with Wi Taepa. Turns out he spent time in the mid-90s in Santa, showed at Glenn Green Galleries, knew the folks at Shidoni, and ran in some of the same circles I did.

PJM + Wi Taepa (Photo: Joe Adams)

I was very inspired and impressed: I want to learn ceramics [!] LoL; travel to New Zealand; and jump into the CCC offerings. Tonight, Joe and I will attend the painting exhibit of Justyna Kisielewicz, “America Is a Great Place to Live.” The photo set below contains some installation shots of that show, images of the Maori collective program and a few environmental pictures of the CCC facility.

PART TWO

Justyna Kisielewicz [Photo: Joe Adams]

The next evening (October 18), Joe returned to Astoria and picked us up, and we drove up to CCC's Royal Nebeker Art Gallery for Justyna Kisielewicz Artist's reception for "America is a Great Place to Live." The event was well-attended by students, faculty and local artsies.

CCC painting instructor Kristin Shauck, Justyna and (I think) CCC students [Photo: Joe Adams]

Justyna gave a very brief art talk, but the Q & A was memorable. Answering many questions from those in attendance, Justyna was refreshingly direct and energetic in her informative responses. The title of the show is not ironic. A Polish immigrant, Kisielewicz described her artistic evolution in context of the political, academic and economic circumstances she has experienced in her home country and here in the USA. She acknowledged that her transnational perspective is open to expansion, as a result of, for instance, forays into nature & outside the stereotypes (produced via TV, memes, and so on), which used to color her ideas about America, to an extent. She spoke a lot about her craft, artist processes and training. I have been to many such presentations, by artists of every description, and Justyna's stands out as one of my all-time faves, due to the inspirational message and sincerity.

Joe, Shane and I had fun mugging for each others’ photos:

Yes, we know it’s bad form to make faces in photos at art parties. No disrespect to the nice, serious people in this picture.

[Note: Sorry bout the washed-out/too dark extremes in these pics; my phone cam did its best & P-shop can only do so much. Joe’s pics turned out much better! If you’d like to see better representations of Justyna’s excellent paintings, check out her Instagram and Facebook pages, or her website.]

AFH UPDATE [October 2018]

Yeah. That just happened.

My family and I just moved across North America. The settings [Bushwick versus Astoria (OR)] are almost comically disparate. In Astoria, the sound of a siren is rare. Drivers rarely honk. Garbage is not strewn almost everywhere the eye rests. I don’t think I’ve seen a single instance of street art. The air is fresh. People are friendly and hardly ever in an apparent rush. I tallied a short list of stuff I miss about Brooklyn: OSLO coffee in the morning; BEST Pizza; Fortunato Bros. canoli; Artist & Craftsman; and a couple dozen friends. My list of crap I am happy to leave behind in NYC is innumerably long and varied.

Photo: PJM

In the adjustment phase after a big move, I’ve found it pays not to put a ton of credence in the initial feelings, sensations and impressions associating with both past and future. A meditative approach - letting those blasts of specificity pass through consciousness without attachment - helps soften the landing, helps one avoid calcifying narratives that fail to serve one living through any of the available time zones. I am not an astronaut planting a flag on the moon, after all.

Notes on Dimensional Time [NYC 2010+8]

Before we exited the NY Scene, I revisited the photo series “Notes on Dimensional Time (NoTD),” selecting a small fraction of representative images from the enormous collection. The project encompasses a period of eight years (our time in NY), pointing to 4D predictive processes, among others. The scope of the inventory of sequential photos spans macro-social phenomena, studio progressions/expositions, engagement with environment, and switches to other “worlds” like Switzerland and Los Angeles. Some interesting features of the work are the conforming quality of numbers, commemoration as attraction, color presence and more.

Poetry & Precipitation

We have been warned frequently to prepare for the months-long drench that saturates the Oregon Coast. The weather since we arrived has been nothing short of marvelous. The misty, rainy, cloudy days and nights of rain have affected me not in the manner folks speculated they would do. The watery atmosphere inspires me to poetry:

Timbr

Minecraft means a different thing
On a computer, underground, in database analysis
Migration is no joke
If you imagine a body in a computer,
underground, in a database, analyzed
You can visualize movement sequences
in each environment. You will notice
variations, which you may find interesting,
telling, as in revealing, demonstrating
the differences in the environment(s).

He selects a water-rounded stone from many
in the driveway. This one is heavy, relatively
big, pockmarked, dark blue-gray and dense.
He explains to me the stone is dinosaur poop.
I say, “OH?” He assures me, YES, it is. I allow
him to keep it, to place it in a cupholder, in the car.
The story of the stone evolves. I like the sound
of his child voice, its conviction, its of-a-certain-age
complexity. Is that the marker for curiosity? Do
I hear a note of uncertainty, or is he inviting me
to respond, to ratify, to reinforce his narrative?

In the woods, the deer sleeps at the base
of a 100-foot pine tree, folded into a loop
of golden hair, black hooves and nose, white
tufts, breath, in measured blasts. I can see
the stars again, and that is Orion’s belt.
In the short hills across the valley, a cougar
stalks among the shoots along the River,
a vast waterway of sunken vessels, moving
through the Night toward the Ocean. I can see
it all and more through my looking glass,
pointed out the window of the attic of our
century-old house. I hear my child stirring
downstairs, by the fireplace, under his blanket.


Twins, Gymnasts 14

Pausing in a turn, we pivot, gazing at the Bridge.
The Full Moon risen above the Column, beyond ~
Past the optimum angle for the photographer.
To my eye, the mono optical version with a bit
of blur, the scenes mesh and he and I smile,
sharing the sensation of Time staging the event
inherent in our temporary condition, a point
at which the Vision may be confirmed by a knowing
look. He is a fisherman. I am an artist. Now
we are both travelers whose dimension is ever
emerging, a continuum the medium of which is
Memory. The vehicle is a machine. The sky
periodically empty, unless Eddie Vedder's jet
should cut a path through it, noisy and white.
Compare that to the circling bald eagle. Both
are emblems, representations, and autonomous
of the external view, Real of themselves,
compressed, expressive in a secondary, parallel
World of definition.

Stability achieved through joining structure,
the truss, does not explain the two does,
standing side by side in the front yard
of the darkened home, by the mailbox. Any
more than it explains the Creek between
the old Seaside road and the new one. Traffic
over there is faster, denser, more dangerous,
than we find on this one. Topology reflects
the conception of Time, not its mutability. Tom
describes George, the solitary crab in the tub
on the pier by the jetty in terms of survival,
profound endurance, fasting for 45 days
in only water. A marvel. Need for sustenance
appears to be relevant to the creature, only
in perspective, I guess.

The twins’ father, I think, is a cop. I won’t allow
this informed assumption to spoil the moment.
Celtic law is fairly strict, and divination is messy
business. Spatial separation is a negotiation
these magic beings solve through intuition. He
mentions the elder sister, describing her in thirds,
implying triplets, a very different configuration,
containing a gap. The twins subtly communicate
the answer, at the edge of his perception’s limits.
Do they always perform, I wonder? How big
is their awareness of the Other? Its reach feels
massive, an expanse outpacing reckoning. He
tries to translate it in a word-picture about complex
flips in a landing, and I recall a tiny Olympian
spinning through the space within a TV screen,
years ago.

Arriving home, I have a hard time sleeping.
The distinctions between waking and dreaming
dissolved in the movements. Cushions ease
the discomfort, and the fireplace reduces the ache
in these bones. Outside, the light is fantastic,
filtered through trees and thorny brush, pooling
on the unexpected, surface. The air is beautiful,
fresh, crisp, my breath’s embrace. The tobacco
intervenes, & I hear a Song from far away. It is
not a ship, a postman, a radio, a lover, a birthday.
My phone is not ringing. It is not smart. Or dumb.
The wind rises slightly, but noticeably. I will not
forget Standing Rock, so long as I live. No one
can make me.

“Rigging [h]” by PJM

Accessing the Astoria art scene was a piece of cake! We met Zelda English at Blue Scorcher through our kids, and she kindly invited us to taco night at her home, where we met her polymath partner Barry (artist, arborist, mason, etc.) and a portion of her friend circle during a lovely, warm evening to-do. Subsequently, Zelda invited us to her WAKE Gallery for a closing reception for “All About Hands,” the excellent exposition featuring a collaborative project by visiting multidisciplinary creatives Ariane Pick and Yves Prince from Paris, France. The gregarious, lovely couple spent the summer painting and photographing in and around Astoria, which yielded a diverse body of work conceptually centered on the hand. The event was thoroughly enjoyable, and included a well-appointed pot luck and a raffle, too. The art was arrayed smartly in the raw, transitional show space, interspersed with text and supplemental print + hand drawn graphics. Ariane and Yves were a lively pair, dancing through the Astorian crowd of well-wishers, engaging individuals and small groups with apparent exuberance. Barry led the children, including our Lachlan, on an exploration of the pier nearby. Afterwards, on the way to the car, we dropped by McVarish Gallery and met Jill McVarish (a terrific painter herself) and Morrison Pierce, whose poignant exhibit “America Is” was on display. A few days later, my wife Lauren and I attended the monthly meeting of the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association at Baked Alaska. In sum, it was the most fun I’ve ever had at a business meeting! The agenda was facilitated ADHDA by current prez and Astoria mayoral candidate Dulcye Taylor, owner/operator of Old Town Framing Company. The meeting program commenced with a rousing presentation by recent transplant Paul Polson, who has opened a studio/gallery on 10th Street. [See a sample of Paul’s paintings HERE.] Polson sketched his impressive, diverse artsy autobiography/resume for the assembly, and shared poignant thoughts on the value of art for the community. Paul’s lifelong enthusiasm for the artistic enterprise was evident, and he didn’t hesitate to suggest ways he was willing to add his chops, which include big-time theatrical set design and Macy’s float production, to the local cultural mix. The remainder of the ADHDA program proceeded apace, was chock-full of neat upcoming opportunities to get involved with events and fundraisers, and the routine stuff one expects. When the meeting concluded Lauren and I were surrounded by friendly Astorians, excited to find out more about us and welcome us to our new home town. In a short period of time, we had no problem getting to know some Astorian artsies! Moreover, we have learned that Astoria and the coastal communities we’re exploring (e.g., Seaside, Cannon Beach, Warrenton, Tillamook, etc.) are vibrant and rich in history, and the many people we’ve met have practically uniformly been generous, friendly and kind. We are happy to report our new Oregon life is shaping up to be grand, indeed!

We visited Portland today to meet Gwen and Elizabeth at Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Judy Cooke's exhibition in ELG's front room was excellent! Afterwards, we dropped by Froelick Gallery, where I viewed several remarkable Rick Bartow paintings. We had pizza for lunch at Hot Lips Pizza, and coffee later at Jim and Patty's Coffee. Both were yumz. We were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to day trip to Portland from Astoria!

The Astoria Art Walk (an ADHDA project) happens every second Saturday. The October 13 edition came on the heels of the overtime victory enjoyed by Oregon Ducks over the Washington Huskies, settling this year's football rivalry in favor of the big O’s. The win set the mood! I endeavored to crawl through a sampler of the participating art-walk galleries and studios on the list of venues, and am happy to report the affair was as I expected: a great conversation starter with local artsies, fueled by the usual finger-food/boozy spreads, plus some mindfully presented fine art. My first stop was Art Loft, a studio/gallery collective atop Astoria’s art supply shop, Dots ‘N Doodles [!], which featured a holdover show (Shon Frostad’s “Love of the Sea”), a set of framed watercolors by Stan Riedesel, also with a nautical focus, and little gem-like dot paintings by Chimoyo. I enjoyed a friendly discussion of the watery subjects in Stan’s paintings with the artist, during which fishy art-chat, I couldn’t help notice his massive hands, which are a bit incongruous, considering the sensitivity of his brushwork. I have a soft spot in my heart for art concerns like Art Loft, which serve a vital and historic role in the American cultural topology. These sustainable art orgs are generally artist-driven, community-based nodes for creative networks outside urban markets for art. The tie the social to the medium, and contribute to the environmental, continuing art ed in villages, towns and even regions across the nation. Art snobs may poo poo traditional watercolor societies, co-ops and such, but in this country they have formed a massive democratic movement for art that has even adapted to the virtual. The online correlate is Wet Canvas, which doesn’t get the kind of cool-kid attention that, say, DeviantArt or Doodle Addicts receive, but has consistently facilitated a useful and encouraging forum/exchange for artists at all levels, since 1998 (ancient, by web standards), boasts about a million members and a staggering amount of activity. Next on my list was McVarish Gallery to take in the new exhibit there, excellent paintings by Jane Terzis. As noted above, this was a repeat-visit at Jill McVarish’s great Astoria art space, and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, the light in the early evening (@5pm) was flat-out wondrous, even profound. The buttery sunlight cast dramatic shadows through the big shop windows, and after a lovely talk in the midst of prep for the Art Walk crowds, which were already gathering, Jill stopped to pose by her remarkable paintings, opposite the entrance. A couple doors down is Paul Polson’s new studio-gallery, which is. after only three months in operation, shaping up to be a terrific multi-use space for the artist to make, exhibit and sell is paintings, plus potentially host talks and performances. Paul is powwowing with Jill and others to draw buzz and traffic to that corner of downtown Astoria, and the enterprise looks promising, for sure. My final stop this month on the art walk was Imogen Gallery, and Marc Boone’s installation of ab-ex tree paintings on canvas. Each of these three galleries on the tour also put out generous victuals for visitors, were delightfully hospitable, and excited about the event. I met Marc and his bride, and had a chummy talk with the former. Turns out we both have art installer anecdotes galore. His experiences are more extensive than mine. Marc is a true OG, old school artsy, and we had tons of fun remembering episodes from the logistics world for art, an often bizarre and PTSD-creating side of the art world whose practitioners rarely get the props they deserve for keeping the wheels turning and the lights on. I look forward next month to the next iteration of the Astoria Art Walk, to visiting those spots I didn’t get to this time, and returning to see new stuff at those I did!

Shane’s here! He brought a couple of badass vehicles with him to Oregon!

The view out our river-facing window is radically different from the one we had in the loft at Jefferson Street in Bushwick! (Photo: Lauren)

AFH UPDATE [September 2018]

AFHstudioBK Is Closed.

The move-out was completed on August 30th, but preparations occupied much of the month, which the road trip from Bushwick to Oregon interrupted. I have learned that every studio opening and closing possesses a unique flavor and resonance. Each produces a particular sensation that will eventually congeal into a narrative, with attaching summary, list of evocative memories and notable anecdotes. Some get a soundtrack. Moving my studios over the years from room to room, building to building, state to state, etc., has reinforced an awareness of the physical nature of art. Achy back, damaged hands, bruises and bumps, sleep deprivation - all are symptoms of the studio move. The raw 269 Powers [BK] moves were accomplished with the help of Metropolis Moving, and my Godkid Misha, but I still did the prodigious prep work, alone. The artist life involves un-romantic scenarios galore, that may look fine in a montage. The sort of psychic upheaval that attends the shuttering of an atelier is difficult to adequately translate to fictional and illusory media. Maybe VR will be a better medium for capturing the transitional state of artists whose labor has no permanent home. I have known some artists who settled in studios for decades at a time. When I was working for LA Packing, Crating and Transport (that's me on the short ladder in the pic/slideshow on the LAPC&T site front page installing Jonathon Borofsky numbers), I was on a crew helping break down Sam Francis' studio after his passing. It was a huge job. Sam employed a crack team of top-shelf logistics people. We coordinated with them. The atmosphere was palpable, visceral and tangible. I don't know how to adequately frame it, and won't try. I don't like the idea of being a tourist for that singular project. I participated on a few operations, picking up monumental-sized canvases, disposing of materials, and so on, but there were many others other guys handled. That job installed in my mind a perception of artist ghosts who haunt studios and the people who enter the haunts of artists, living and dead.

Traversing America [Again]

I am consistently stunned when someone reveals to me in conversation that they have never taken to the USA highway system (red + blue) and explored this country by automobile. The span of the nation is contained in the proverbial road trip in a way that's inaccessible by plane, bus or other mode of transportation. I would contend that a working comprehension of America is not complete absent the cross-country driving experience. Each traversal of the US by car is fraught with danger, mystery, wonder and a range of often conflicting phenomena. Music is an essential component. Maps also. A navigator is the proper foil for the driver's task. Monuments, diners, marvelous landscapes and a sequence of encounters with local characters define the journey to some extent. The time element is a contiguous presence. If there is a mission, that colors the trip. If one is adrift, or otherwise actively not directed by motivation or intent, the road tripper generates a speculative circumstance for the trek. Whether one is a practitioner or novice on the Road clearly affects the receptivity of the traveler to external and internal momentum/inertia, or entropy. Tensions and capacity (i.e., endurance) play within the dynamic unfolding of every long form transnational crossing. Shane Kennedy and I have shared the road together often over the past couple of decades, in all sorts of vehicles and conditions. This most recent iteration of the Epic USA Bi-Coastal Ride, originating in Bushwick and culminating in Astoria, OR (actually Portland by PDX), will I believe rank highly on the Best of- list. Technically, glitches were rare and minor. In keeping with the protocols of the medium, most of the details will remain our own treasure. If the American Road Trip is not art, at minimum it is art worthy. The experience is a form of saturation, in the context of conditioned programming. Like any 4D proposition, it is specific and unrepeatable. I am thinking of Lewis & Clark, the Oregon Trail, but also Kerouac, and some bards, too. I am also thinking about the state of the country I love, and that love has been shaped over time by the Road Trip, which at this point in my life has expanded into a sequential order, a serial affair, a sensational mix of countless moments and layered images. No one can understand my art and person, absent acknowledgement of the Road's effects upon it. The fool who discounts the import of the Road on the American culture and consciousness will be frequently shocked by the citizen's dimensional, sophisticated perspective on machine-enabled coming & going, day & night. The soul of those uninitiated in the US Highway, its weird dreams and harsh reality, is shallow and unequipped to analyze the nation's modern sons and daughters. 

Sale Graphic by PJM [Credit: Little Yellow Miner + Canary by Bryce McCloud of Isle of Printing for SEAM01 at TAG (Nashville, 2001)]

Starting September with a Labor Day Sale at Good Faith Space!

Our new tagline at GFS is "GET SOME!" Thoughts?

State of the Artz Section

Much of the summertime art news in 2018 ping pongs among talking points that in many aspects  don't reconcile. The collapsing mid-range economy for art (in the West, anyway) will not be adequately supplanted by photo-op mills that are branded "museums," nor will Basel announcing progressive booth pricing solve the inequality among the Art Bigs like Gagosian and everybody else. Tech art is still a bizarre wrinkle in the fabric of culture. Bruce Sterling's SXSW 2018 (above) keynote reveals much about the emerging field, which in parts is swiftly normalizing [see SRL at the Seattle Art Fair, now directed by Nato Thompson (Can you find Bruce in the article - the dude's all over the place!)]. The real subtext here is that the tech sector is consolidating wealth and power at an alarming rate, so much so that the other social sectors (political, military, police, etc.) are pivoting to reign in the advance of Big 5 mega-corporations through diverse approaches. "Art" is traditionally a means by which the rich and powerful elites diffuse animosity from those who are distressed by the control of massive resources by a fortunate few individuals and companies or syndicates. Sterling's exhortation seems well-enough defined to serve as a practical guide for pushing a tech-art movement into and through the budgets of major players. Clearly, the programming of "art" into tech-evolution is a prospect that is nothing new. It can be tracked at least as far as Leonardo, and arguably the Greeks, which Kittler and others have pointed out. The question is whether any artifying of tech apps (robots, social media, Big Data, etc.) will adequately soften a public that is threatening to turn on the various fields of science and technology that are producing obviously negative effects in the lives of so many people. Are art/tech hype campaigns like THIS in any manner really digestible as real solutions? The shine of ubiquitous, useful "toys" for network communications, computing and connecting People to Things and Things to each other is quickly wearing off. Will art polish tech's dangerous edges? I don't know, but I found a book that I hope clarifies my projections of our tech-affected collective future (enthusiastically recommended by Bruce Sterling and SF/Tech Thinker Bigs like William Gibson & Rudy Rucker):

Frankly, I am bemused of the general confusion expressed by analysts who refuse to acknowledge the stark lessons and unequivocal systemic information uncovered through the dimensional movements of the past decade (mainly OWS, Bernie's Presidential campaign, Standing Rock, but also plenty of others, appearing and disappeared around the globe). The precarious state of most of the art world parallels the precarity of democracy itself, of the economy, of international relations, etc. Nature itself feels very precarious and menacing simultaneously (for humanity, anyway). The primary problems have been accurately identified. Actionable orders are obvious. Precedents demonstrate that the necessary changes are not only feasible, but proven effective. Anyone pretending otherwise now, or falling for any of the distractions pushed by those in great measure responsible for our big problems, and who derive great benefits from those problems remaining unsolved ~ well, pretense itself has become intolerable, and pretenders, too. Talk about Fake.

"Wings" ~ graphic for CD design (ca. 2003, PJM)

On Leaving NYC and Moving to Oregon

Many have breathlessly inquired as to the nature of our migration from Brooklyn to the Northwest coast. On the NYC side, the quality of the inquiry is almost invariably hued by a peculiar cognitive disjunction, which might be characterized as disbelief in the possibility that such a dramatic relocation is possible, wise, even conceivable. More than anything the inquisitor is basing the incredulity on rudimentary assumptions and cultural projections. Why would someone choose small town living over the cosmopolitan offerings of an international destination and trendy hot spot like Bushwick? Did I not notice the movie set on the street in front of our loft building this morning, or the runway models wandering in robes, under umbrellas through the neighborhood all day? Will I not miss the easy felafel dinner option we are enjoying from a couple blocks down, by the House of Yes, next to the Jefferson St. L stop (~ Queen of Felafel)? Shane and I discussed this sort of interrogation by confused New Yorker friends and acquaintances at some length on our road trip. It is symptomatic of a certain stultifying mindset among what I would call captured or captive persons, many of whom will express amazement that anyone could think to leave the city with one sentence, and follow that sentence with a dozen more describing the horrid aspects they despise, which definitely accompany NYC/Brooklyn life. The truth is, my list of things I will miss about NYC/BK is short, and the list of things I will not miss is long. Mostly, it is not things I will miss, but people whom I have grown to love and value over the past eight years of being a New Yorker. I have resided, visited and worked in a fair sample of American communities and a few abroad. A spectrum of experience in congregations big and small, rural and urban, tribal and civilized, productive and destructive, virtual and actual, affords me (I hope) an accurate sense of cost-benefit, with respect to home. At least for the moment, an American citizen can still up and move to another part of the country and start fresh, hoping to improve her or his life and circumstances. That is exactly what we are up to. The proposition is alternately scary and exhilarating, and both feelings are moderated through healthy doses of research, planning and logistical know-how. I won't share my special secret for navigating big change in locus here ~ it's not the proper forum. But I will say I believe we all ought to be in the right place at the right time to do what needs doing. Which is one definition of courage. Still, speaking for myself for emphasis, the people one leaves behind tug at the heart most. It helps to have confidence that new friends await on the opposite end of this beautiful, myriad continent.

YONDER [Reflections]

Mobility as a practical matter activates the process of narrative formation. Mobile narratives are naturally dimensional. They scan the past for clues (reasons), shift in the changing topology of a blurry present, and propose possible futures arising from former conditions, circumstances and scenarios.

My family and I are preparing to move across the North American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast. The immediate quality of our daily activities suggests miasma. Impulsive ordering of the material and immaterial is practically reflexive. 

A few days ago I found myself diverted to a project that led to a sequential revelation of motivations, pertinent to my artist life. The catalyst was a search for photographic portraits of my friend Jennifer (Niederst) Robbins made in the 80s during our Notre Dame studies. Searching through a pile of scrapbooks and folders, I haven't yet found the pictures I originally set out to find. What I discovered instead was a trove of photos documenting my earliest, formative artist experiences.

Of these, a handful emerged as particularly relevant in shaping my views of the art business, art world, and patronage. Reflecting on some specific episodes, I today revel at my tenacity, in pursuit of artistic success. Despite what strike me (now) as horrible experiences, I somehow did not abandon the art enterprise in those first years of my so-called artist career. The act of reflection generates a variant definition of what I do and have done for more than three decades. Art is more a vocation, than a commercial identity, in my mind. Otherwise, I might be compelled by the data to conclude that no sane individual would choose fine art as a professional enterprise, given the typical state of the game for artists, especially those just starting out.

In the text that follows, I will share some anecdotes that hopefully clarify the statement above for the reader. If this chronicle helps another artist, one way or another, all the better. If it starts or adds to a discussion about the systematically brutal and wasteful American arts topology, with its sparkly, rigged vertical fixtures, more to the greater good. 

God
8' x 4'
Mixed media [plywood, car door lining, acrylic paint, found materials + more]
1985

1. GOD

This was one of my first art commissions. My memory of the details are a bit vague. I have a foggy recollection of how the thing went down. Maybe the pastor of a local South Bend (IN) Catholic church approached the ND art department, in a search for an artist to do an altarpiece for his chapel? We met, and I got the gig, which I completed between my Junior and Senior years. He had to fight to get approval from the church council. He won the commission funding ($480) in a bingo game, which he figured was a divine intervention. I stayed at the rectory for about a month and made the art. I was drinking a lot then, driving a '78 Trans Am outfitted like the Smokey and the Bandit sports car. When I finished, we hung the art. Almost immediately, the congregation rebelled. The pastor (whose name I can't remember) defended the art and insisted it remain. He passed away about a year later, and I learned that "God" had summarily been disposed of. In hindsight, the experience on the whole proved very educational, with regards the vicissitudes of art/collective/patronage/production, + more. I have never entertained the notion of creating art for churches, since then (although I have received a few inquiries, over the years).

I put everything I could muster into this project. Looking at the image, greatly benefited/restored to close-to-realism by the editing tools of Photoshop, I am proud of the effort. I especially appreciate the iconography, the use of materials and their implications, my Vision of It, of God, at the age of 21. I sure would love to sit down with the young man who painted/assembled this art, to share a meal, to have a chat. I would love to meet the Me of 33 years ago (pretty much to the day).

One of the valuable things about art is it bridges time spans like that 33-year one. I don't really need a time machine, because I have art. Reflection via art is to my mind better in some important respects than the Back to the Future movie version of "time travel." The differences between art enabled time travel and the cinematic imagination's - that's a big topic for another text.

Liberty
6' x 6'
Mixed Media [1/4" steel, railroad ties, acrylic paint, barbed wire, spray paint + more]
1986 (Process photo)

2. LIBERTY

I wrote about this recently. "Liberty" was created shortly after I graduated from ND, and almost died in a motorcycle wreck less than a week later. Maria Rand was the wife of notable NY-based sculptor Archie Rand and curator/buyer for Unique Boutique in Manhattan. Unique was one of the cool shops that sold my FunkShunArt tee shirts in the city. Maria invited me to contribute an art for a show she was putting together, marking the Centennial Celebration of the Statue of Liberty. She said the show was going to be a big deal happening at Herald Square. Archie would be in the show. Maybe Keith Haring, Andy. We spoke on the phone a few times, and when I visited the shop with new FunkShunArt, over a period of weeks or months. It was a long time ago, and the details are a bit fuzzy, now.

..."Liberty" was my offering. "Liberty" was painted on a big sheet of steel and framed in railroad ties and barbed wire. I found the source image in a Playboy magazine. You can't really tell from the Photoshop-improved, old photograph that the finished painting really shimmered, thanks to (relatively new) iridescent acrylics, gel medium, glitter, etc. When completed "Liberty" weighed a couple hundred pounds. JP Keyes drove to Beckley, WV, where I made the art in my parents' garage (during my rehab from the MC-crash-caused head injury), and we loaded it into the Par 3 tour van and drove back to Jersey City, where the band based. JP had just installed a multi-channel sound system in the van, and we listened to a selection of tapes during the ride. It was an educational experience. The art was ready to be delivered on the previously agreed upon deadline date.

The next day, I reached out to Maria. I got the "NY shuffle." Over the next few days, I got the runaround. When I finally got Maria on the phone, she was rude, to put it mildly. Our conversation was colorful. I think my recent brain trauma had an effect on my reaction. The gist? Maria: No show, whatever, GTFO. The next evening, Par 3 & I delivered "Liberty" to Unique. Maria wasn't there. We installed it in the front area of the shop and left. A security dude tried to stop us and wisely stopped doing that.

My righteous anger/rebellion/triumph moment was short-lived. When I took the train to the city, maybe the next day, to see/photograph "Liberty" at Unique, the art was gone. I was furious, although I don't think the UB staffer had a clue, when I curiously asked, "What happened to the big Statue of Liberty painting that I saw here yesterday?" He shrugged and said, "I think some guys threw it in the dumpster in the alley. That thing was heavy. One of them broke his hand moving it."

I can pretend otherwise, but I was alternately brokenhearted and filled with rage. In hindsight, the experience on the whole was a valuable, instructive, initial encounter with the "NY art world." I've been skeptical of curators and their speculative plans ever since.

Angel Series [FunkShunArt (ca. 1984-5)] / Silkscreen + acrylic paint on tee shirt

3. FALLEN ANGEL (No Photo Documentation)

The details of this episode are hazy. A fellow Domer (ND student) offered me - I think - $60 or $80 to paint a mini-mural in his dorm room. I completed the task in short order. I never got the opportunity to photograph my work. As I recall, the figure of a downcast, wrenched angel was directly painted on the wall with bright acrylic primary colors. Really, "Fallen Angel" was more drawing with paint than painting proper. My student-patron did compensate me, and then within a few days overpainted "Fallen Angel" without telling me. When I visited him with friends to share with them what I had made and photograph "Fallen Angel," the guy/patron answered the door and sheepishly admitted to his art destruction. I cursed him out. He apologized.  I can't recall ever painting on a wall again, indoors or outside, with one exception (see below).

I admit to a consequent, jaundiced notion of street art, murals, interior wall treatments by artists, probably due to this experience. The negativity association extends to euphemisms like "creative destruction," "erasure," and so on.  & Unilateral wall-art obliteration by an owner, like the infamous 5Pointz whitewashing, which had a happy/unhappy ending.

Violence toward art as a prerogative of ownership, or as problematic cultural expression or critique or whatever (see Rauschenberg/de Kooning incident/history) is an uncomfortable subtext in the art/cultural continuum. On the international stage in recent times, ISIS, the Taliban and Al Queda have practiced art/culture obliteration on a massive scale. Being aware of such phenomena, I try not to take others' art-destructive urges and rationalizations personally anymore ~ with a modicum of success. The key is channeling outrage into productive outcomes, and it doesn't hurt to know one's legal options. However, as the 5Pointz case illustrates, it is not obvious that legal recourse can sufficiently address the problem. After all a unique art/cultural expression, once eradicated or vandalized, is not necessarily recoverable.

Yesterday, a man hijacked an airliner, conversed in-flight with air traffic controllers with war planes in hot pursuit of his stolen aircraft, which he subsequently crashed on an island. The man's suicide-by-plane can be interpreted endlessly. Many in the media questioned, "What was his motive?" This artist responds that the definition of performance art is so broad that the incident might be described as a creative expression culminating in the immolation of the plane and the practitioner. Is my ironic explanation really so farfetched, nowadays? What is permissible, if any-everything can be construed as art, and any-/everyone can self-identify as an artist?

Clearly, human beings' struggle with our contradictory impulses for creation and destruction takes many forms, and is scalable. The fundamental issue is of course, Why?

Sneaky Petes
48" x 36"
Acrylic and Tempera on Canvas
1986

4. SNEAKY PETE (No Photo Documentation)

The owner of a local ice cream shop approached the ND Art Department with a proposal for students to decorate his newly opened or renovated store. He would provide materials and ice cream. A graduate student who had been one of my first instructors brought the project to my attention. I agreed to participate, as did a handful of other art students. Each of us was assigned a booth, with an inset, shadowbox wall, upon which we could paint what we wished. I think the owner suggested ice cream-oriented content, but wasn't very strident about it. I promptly began to paint one of my Sneaky Pete creatures in the assigned area, which was about 6' x 5', with two 6' tall, maybe 2.5' wide panels perpendicular to the centerpiece (as I recall). I worked feverishly for about five days during business hours between classes, about 40-50 hours or more total. The Sneaky Pete figure was dramatic, unsettling and jarring. His Eye was a textured swirl of technicolor paint, eventually animated and complex enough to give viewers the impression Pete was watching them as they moved through the shop. The painting contained many layers. Although the color field behind the figure eventually took on a vibrant cerulean blue hue, it shimmered, and contained text elements in applique and hand-painted renderings. Hovering on either side and above Pete were words, such as "WAR" and "PEACE" and "LOVE" and "HATE." At the end of the week I was exhausted and deeply satisfied, proud of the completed art. I couldn't wait to bring my friends (the Keyes bros. + Scott O'Grady) to see it. We hopped in someone's car, maybe Jim's "Grey Ghost," and drove over.

It was yet another disaster. The shop owner, uncomfortable about the text and eye effect, had dipped a 4" or 6" in a can of blue paint and wiped out the words and the "eye." I couldn't speak. My buddies and I drove back to the dorm. They followed me downstairs and looked on as I threw chairs around the room and howled.

A couple of years later, I returned to that ice cream shop. I was outfitted in the manner of Road Warrior. I outlined for the owner some options, all of which ended with my covering my art with white paint. He chose the one that did not also entail harm to his family (who were seated nearby, enjoying sundaes, shakes and cones) and himself, and time-permitting, the burning down of the ice cream store, before the police arrived. I put some music on [Allman Bros., "Whipping Post" (live)], savored some sipping whiskey, and painted over the disfigured art. As I was leaving, I keyed the owner's beloved Corvette.

I haven't entered into any similar commission arrangements, since then. & I'm not really proud of what happened. That said, to this day, I marvel at what people will do without any concern about the repercussions, the consequences, of their behavior, power dynamics be damned. The Chinese just destroyed Ai Wei Wei's studio. Wonder what will come of that this time?

YONDER [Thoughts]

1. Some simple actions require no thought.

2. Survival as such is not art.

3. Being adrift is a state of being, but also a specific type of movement.

4. Displacement does not mean a thing will come to rest eventually.

5. Distance is a metrical form.

6. You can tell how disagreeable a person/place/thing is to one by how far one will travel to get away from the disagreeable person/place/thing, regardless of the degree of difficulty in the transition.

AFH UPDATE [July 2018]

FRAGMENT 1

I first moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, shortly after graduating from the University of Notre Dame. How I arrived in "The City Different" is its own story, the poetic version of which is:

A nearly fatal motorcycle crash + a UHaul ride with a fraught father to WV + [immediately] starting-completing the 250# 6'x 6' Statue of Liberty Painting on Steel/Railroad Ties/Barbed Wire for a SoL(LoL) Centennial celebration/exhibit at Herald Square (which instead landed at Unique Boutique > then the dumpster behind UB ~ Fuck U Maria Rand) + 1 month of Jersey City *working last gas station before the Holland Tunnel with Par3 crew & painting stage backdrop & outfits/gear for the band + escape from NY + bad scene in Wisconsin + Colorado > Red Rocks > Trinidad > Raton > Santa Fe > Upper Canyon Rd > Gypsy Alley ... Babe's/El Farol/Carriage Trade ... Artisan's/Elaine Horwitch Gallery ...

I spent most of the decade (1986-95) in the thriving and vibrant Santa Fe art community. Many of the fundamental notions I have of painting, the art business, logistics, presentation and the artist life were formed then. My mentor at Notre Dame, Don Vogl set the table for this experience. About the photo above. I came across it over the weekend in the results of a casual search for Allan Houser. I briefly worked for David at his gallery and met Allan's son Bob Haozous. TC was already gone by then and a legend. His work still lingers in my top-5 all-time list, with Pollock, Michelangelo, etc. David is now a distinguished OG (on the board of SFGA, the Houser estate's Curator of Collections, + more)...

Rick Bartow "The Returning" (Photo)

FRAGMENT 2

I don't know how, but I missed Rick Bartow all these years. I came across his profile while scanning Northwest artists. During the Eureka Project I should have made some connection. Oh, well ~ it happens that seemingly obvious connections stay unmade. Rick Bartow passed in 2016. Fortunately, an excellent exhibit of Bartow's paintings is touring a select group of Western museums. God willing, I'll see "Things You Know but Cannot Explain" at one of them. Maybe I'll see you there, dear reader.

Seaside, OR (Photo PJM, ca. 1983)

FRAGMENT 3

I shot this photo during a madcap Notre Dame holiday break. My roommate Scott concluded he had to visit his girlfriend and family, so we rented a car and drove from South Bend to Beaverton, Oregon and back, destroying the car in the process (those were the days). We took a side trip to Seaside. Now, a quarter century or so later, I think we're going to relocate to this part of the country.

“Rodrigo Hernández: The Gourd & The Fish” installation view (Source)

FRAGMENT 4

I keep an eye on current and emerging Art World notes. I routinely visit dozens of key sites, blogs, and other online sources. Now, that I'm reintegrating soc.med platforms within the AFH frameworks, I am pushed all sorts of AW data from hundreds of culture transmitters/amplifiers/influencers/marketeers/advocates/promoters/news outlets..., including artists, magazines, agents and agencies, galleries, museums, content pushers, fans, non-profits, schools and so on. My virtual research is a function of years, now decades, of connecting concepts and phenomena to nodes to events and people IRT. But the issue of time in a networked system swings like a pendulum through the Panopticon of click-thru webbing, through the miasma of simulation + illusion + hyperbole to create a sensation of knowing more about what is happening than is actually possible for a user operating a keyboard/device linked to the Internet. The actual world is operating according to a divergent order - or disorder - than the numbering and naming machine that mediates much of the cultural existence at the moment, for many players. Nonetheless, it is possible to locate valid correlations among things in the massive set of real objects created for visual (art) consumption. The confusing, convoluted matrix of suppressive immaterial clogging the dimensional info-sphere is still insufficient to prevent effective recognition of coincidental or parallel, which is to say almost simultaneous, at least similar, creations by artists separated by distance, with vastly unalike profiles, who use different materials in radical conformity.

Royal Nebeker, Ship of Fools, 2013, from the Loss and Revelation series [Oil and collage on canvas, 84 x 90 inches (LINK)]

FRAGMENT 5

Royal Nebeker passed away in 2016. The biographical essay linked in the caption above paints a picture of Nebeker that conforms to the model for a successful artist life I grew to respect early on. In my experience the model ties into a post-War American phenomenon, at least initially. Eventually the model extended, over several decades, to multiple strata in the art ecosystem. Describing the model suggests an abstract subject, when the object expresses itself sufficiently for shared comprehension. To call Royal Nebeker a type is to apply the rules of fiction to Nebeker's life and art, and the truth of Nebeker's story is better than fiction, and so is his art. In my virtual, on-the-fly research into RN I reviewed a variety of associative articles, plus many images, which are helpful for tracing an evolution, an arc per his art (via compressed/JPG representations). The analyst mustn't assume the power of conclusion within the anecdotal context of the systematic 4 dimensional search. The gist is what one is after, supplemented with verification and/or contradiction toward a refined, workable image of the topic. The search is most useful when motivated with the Hegelian Spirit in mind. Spirit of person, place, manifestation, time and so on.

"Remnant" ~ 12" x 9" ~ Acrylic on Canvas [Culture01 series, 2001 (Nashville, TN/Polifilo)]

FRAGMENT 6

"Remnant" connects directly to the work I'm currently doing. It makes sense for art to take a long time to evolve. Therefore artistic progression is not separable from retrospection. If a viewer wants to know what I'm up to in the studio this week, they might take a peek at what I was doing at the turn of the century, if that is at all possible. Which points to why the absence of commonplace quality art writing is awful, not just for the artist but for all. Rarely has any society maintained integrated art mediation for long. The orientation of cultural discourse has been managed over the past century at least, and the result? We can easily identify the public beneficiaries of mass media focus. It's harder, though not impossible, to identify the machinery necessary to create and direct popular attention to whatever subject currently engulfs it. This is the artifice of programmatic consumption, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with art, itself. In truth, programmatic consumption is spectacularly anti-art, at least in effect, even when it has an artsy veneer.

AFH UPDATE [June 2018]

The representation of Self in art is an anti-art proposition, outside the traditional auto-portrait format in painting. As 4D+ processes expand the possible methods for conducting anti-art operations and transforming the old formats for the auto-portrait, artists find many novel approaches for integrating material and immaterial facets of the Self into structurally recognizable artistic compositions.

Stability in a composition can be achieved through application technique, composition, adherence to formal constraints and so on. The rectangle and circle provide their own stabilizing influence on the painting's visible plane. Stasis, which is a little different than stability, can be subverted in 4D+ painting through effects. Optics play a significant operational role in determining whether a visual tactic is aesthetically successful. Certainly the use of color will affect the impact or lack of it in any arrangement of elements. Pondering the nature of stasis, its desirability in art, and the means by which it may be disrupted, is worthwhile. Balance is a relative of stasis. The Classicist will be attracted to the provisions of geometry for art. By introducing virtuality, the dimensional painter (and sculptor) will punch through the mathematical membrane that restrains pre-4D art. On another level the nominal is subverted by the polysemic nature of meaning in dimensional thought/language. This phenomenon translates in painting to shapes that encourage multiple "readings," none of which on close scrutiny, can be reduced to singular, exclusively specific meaning. 4D+ painting, in other words, escapes the tyranny of text, and does so in the particular and unity forms, its Self. To say that every painting today is a self-portrait is half-true therefore.

The capacity for dimensional art to activate living space has much to do with components. The elements of the living space can be represented in the formal structure within the painting bounds. Identifying a color set that is compatible with most living spaces is not a problem, really. Developing a palette that projects "ART" into the space without destabilizing it is a different tack. The Dimensional artist will displace the discourse on stability/stasis outside the painting into the living space, which is designed to accommodate change, and growth, which is not the same as change. It is helpful to reflect on the dynamic complexity of stability-stasis-change-growth convergence within a Life-platform. The living room above is a convergent (media) space for a family of four. The implications of art in such a space are profound.

WillyPaul 2 series (NewTag) ~ PJM + Will McLean

A critical undercurrent to this discussion is the coupling of certainty and consistency in the medium of choice embodied in art, and then situated in the context of life. Architecture becomes an extension of this subtext. So does the frame. The tissue or membrane separating content and context for art can both magnify and amplify the content relative to the context. The edge of art is pertinent for this reason. The "reality" of art is a function of its definition, not only in space, but in the material composition of the environment or scenario in which the art is placed. The extension of art into dimensional "space" (e.g., this blog post) provisions additional responses to address the divergent protocols (virtual versus actual). In both environments the rules dictate conventional action. In either environment the medium infers a potential scenario, as a set of options. Choice applies in all cases.

WillyPaul 2 series (Crosses) ~ PJM + Will McLean

Memory and memorial coupled in the image within art is a feature of dimensional, especially digital, art. The capacity for the digital composition to integrate multiple layers of source material expands the scenario within the constraint of the edge. The medium of choice operates differently in virtual, visual space. So does geometry. In these WillyPaul collaborations with my son, the activating element is the shape burned into wood by magnifying glass. The stabilizing element is the landscape. The drawing (from the Edward E. Ayer Digital Collection) instills the static feature in the complex array, which blends complex landscape components with many effects and patterns, starting at the pixel level. The 2-+3D mash-up is disrupted by color-driven push and pull. The photographic and gradient + blur effects infer change as a factor of motion, which works in spite of its illusory nature. Pixels don't actually move in a digital image file. We shouldn't gloss over the collaborative aspect of the pieces. The collaboration itself proposes a history that is at once intimate and immediately visible. In the WillyPaul 2 series, at least thus far, the coupling of stories and history proposes a setting for our efforts, while simultaneously adding flesh to the actual narrative attaching to the image. This is the value of 4D+ for art.