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.

TV? Fuggedaboudit!

6-6-09

Today the Times reports that according to the latest research polls, approximately 10% of the American population is unprepared for the nation wide switch from analog broadcasting to digital on the 12^th of June. The government has spent 2 Billion on aiding Americans with the transition and has employed AmeriCorps, firefighters, and other public services to aid people in converter box installations. They have delayed the switch over four months to aid in the transition but declare there will be no more delay. Pictured in the Times as the cover image for this story they present three Baltimore women hugging inside their home after one of them, a worker, has installed the device as if it saved their lives.

 TV comes up in casual conversation with people the same way books once did in our culture. When I tell people I don’t own a TV many often are shocked with such a notion as to not be able to imagine life without it. An old friend used to refer to it as “the mother box”. This poignantly tells the truth because as an object and lifestyle, it has been deeply imbedded into our collective consciousness raising us for over 60 years.

 Now while TV in its various forms has existed since 1927, it wasn’t until 1947 that Americans could begin purchasing ‘affordable’ sets. It was the postwar boom in manufacturing and disposable income and increase in leisure time that allowed this to happen. In 1962 as much as 90% of American households had a TV set.

You see where this is going. Am I in the loony bin? Are TV’s this important? Can we stop and really examine our lives a minute? I suppose I am one of ‘those’ people who had given up on TV a long time ago for things like life or the occasional public radio show. Sure I’ve enjoyed the occasional endless channel surfing at my girlfriend’s mother’s home but it is a passing interest. The economics of the television are too powerful to contend with unless you flip the switch or toss it out the window.

In fact, I invite my fellow Americans to take their precious TVs and toss the things out their windows on June 12^th and go ride bikes this summer. Maybe even talk to your loved ones or walk your dog. Walk a neighbor’s dog, garden, cook, start a social club, brew beer, read, knit, make art, make love, make pancakes. Do anything but sit on your duff and take in the endless stream of commerce. Paddle your way down a river and take in that stream. Just remember your sunscreen.