4-2-09

N. A.M. NYC.

Note-

A heavy fog has set in this morning crossing the Manhattan Bridge gazing Southward towards the Brooklyn, the city looks as if on the edge of the world. It just ends. The old stone bridge becomes the last and only crossing joining the two strange remaining islands on Earth. Then begins the light misty void extending into infinity as it swallows up all that it can off into a sublime unknown.

Wedding Toast: 4-10-09

N. A.M. NYC

Friday. One of the the most glorious six letter words in the English language, particularly at 5 p.m. that very day. A good day to be alive & well with sunshine & slight soreness from yesterday's workout. A hot coffee in hand sipping caffeinated life along the N train tracks. Greta and Aaron are having there party tonight. Ellisa is coming up from B-more to visit for a few days into next week for some acro-yoga classes. Hopefully she'll call off the bus and we can bring her up to the party too. Speaking of the party, I need to solidify my thoughts on the matter. A toast is in order for this evening's festivities. It's not every day that these sorts of things happen to your friends. May I forgive myself for any trespassing into cliche territory and for any trampling into the cheese. Here goes:

A.G. Toast

I have not had the distinct pleasure of knowing our friends Aaron and Greta as long as some of us here this evening, but I would like to note that through their generosity of spirit and friendship I know them no less in terms of their love for each other or for their love of us who have have come to celebrate their joyous marriage. To this I say Aaron & Greta, that though you both may defy some conventions, you also exceed expectations and inspire us all in your love for each other, that when two are married they remind us that not only is love possible but it is the most important fundamental thing in the universe, more powerful than gravity, it binds us in ways that can't be quantified and is thusly mysterious & magical in nature. So I thank you both for bringing the magic to each other and for sharing your new lives with all of us, for inspiring us and for making us once again believers in the power of that most mysterious force called love.

Quote from somewhere memory forgotten past: "All of life can be summed up as an approach to or a departure from the phrase, I love you."

Hope this goes well. Didn't want to be the guy with the long one or the zen guy with a word or two.

Grasping a New Aesthetic Experience:

7-11-09 A.M. Brklyn

From, break it you buy it -to- break it and send it back.

In many corners of this hyper interconnected universe of pattern interfaces and system functions ever expanding experiments on themes go by on and on like water flowing up and down the East River. Depending on what time your train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, the Atlantic will be pushing its salty waters up stream or the Long Island Sound will be rushing down with fresh drops of Hudson and Harlem Rivers. Anyway you look at it, it’s still all greenish brown.

Greenish, Brownish, ish is the new it. If it is, than it is. If it’s definitive, it’s pushy. If it’s vague, it’s noncommittal-- but ish-ish is the new real. It is now-ish.

Whatever art I have been seeing around me is ish. It is good-ish, bad-ish, faux-naïve-ish, and commercial-ish. The lines have been blurred that once separated the distinctions. Were there distinctions? I see artists working toward new problems in a way that is best described in an observation I had in my youth where a caged puppy had defecated and then comsumed his own matter. It’s efficient, contained and theatrical. It is banal, ostentatious, awkward, beautiful, poetic, silly, fun and sarcastic. Sometimes making a joke of the joke, these young artists are seeing themselves see. Not unlike self-consciously trying not to be self-conscious.

Our work, our Art is earthy, lofty, important, meaningless, synthetic, organic, plastic, biodegradable, recycled, handmade, industrial, fake, real, toxic, edible, wild, and domesticated. It is for the individual and for no one all the same. It is both consumption and production, like puppy.

What else could we know but what we know, what we’ve lived? Live our world of online, All-Mart consumer frenzy terrorism fragmented material culture of multi-stage chemical compounded experiences, we web surf, channel surf, reality surf, text, sext, smoke, joke, breed, feed, drink, think-ish.

Tonight like last night they hit the crumbling streets in hipster cigarette packs through the borough on their way to the infirmary. Can you swim to the other side of this anywhere?

Skip it man. You’re flipping your lid off like a soda pop top tab tossed out from a cab. Who’s got the money for the fizz, who for the guy driving this mess?

Art Notes: Fuzzy Math and Dirty Notations

First Published on Neo Images, 2007. A site for Artists and their works. www.neoimages.com

The work addresses the multiplex which is the self. Seeking the appropriate language for a particular idea the work varies greatly in appearance from photo based painting to neo-geo abstraction and collage, narrative hybrid images, and sculpture. Several major thematic origins in my work give way to the inadequacy for a single visual mode.  My interest in manifold ideas can be traced to many artists and other intellectuals as well as from the every day experience, which really stems further back to the notion that any individual needs variation in experience in order to remain stimulated. The notion of variation and an exploratative process can also be traced back to material nature in that one element A can have useful properties vs. another B which also has useful properties but both AB may not be usefull all of the time or in tandem.  The works in their various forms have each in a small way been a piece to the larger whole which is the autobiography.