tyler b. myers

Entire Thesis Paper. "26 characters variously arranged (painstakingly.)"

cloud

Figure 1 Internet generated word cloud of this paper.

Part One (with help from M. S. Thomas)

When Mark Twain says, “I have told you that there are none but temporary truth seekers; that a permanent one is a human impossibility; that as soon as the truth seeker finds what he is thoroughly convinced is the Truth, he seeks no further, but gives the rest of his days to hunting junk to patch it and caulk it and prop it with, and make it weather proof and keep it from caving in on him” I want to go outside in the rain and try to count the rain drops. Ronald Regan Word Cloud Barack Obama Word Cloud

The film you are about to see involves us (all of us) looking westward, and what we see is massive, and it is rough, and it wants us. We are looking west at this film and what we see is something that is in need, or something that can be ours. It is a tragedy, or it is heroic, or it is bloody, or it is the greatest, or it is gone enough to be good enough.

The film you are about to see involves Thomas Jefferson saying, “The larger our association the less will it be shaken by local passions; and in any view is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children than by strangers of another family?” And then saying, “Its soul, its climate, its equality, liberty, laws, people, and manners. My god! How little do my countrymen know what previous blessing they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!”

The film you are about to see will be shown to you while the film’s director sits next to you. Or maybe not next to you. Maybe in the next room. Or maybe not in the next room, maybe just in front of the screen, just below the screen, with his back to the screen, with his eyes on you, and his hand feeling his coat pocket for a pencil.

The film you are about to see involves building on a massive scale. It involves heroism and money. And heroic money.

This is the sound of grass swaying in the wind.

This is the sound of swaying in the wind.

The film you are about to see is small enough to fit in my stomach, or at least my pocket. There is the sound of rivers, the sound of a grassy knoll (pop, pop), the sound of standing on a grassy knoll, grass to your nipples, things like that.

The film you are about to see involves you mourning your loved ones. Or maybe your loved ones mourning you. It involves the search for sustenance and discovering that the land does not wrap presents.

The film you are about to see is the moment just before, or maybe just after, you stuck your hand in your pocket and fingered your loose change; dime, quarter, maybe a penny.

This is the sound of nature giving way to incalculable cycles of duration.

This is the sound of time passing.

Leatherface thinks: but this is how I was raised. He thinks: this is how I was raised. And I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. And I don’t know anything else. I don’t want to be alone. He thinks: I want things to be peaceful. I want to be good. But they won’t understand. They won’t. This is our land. We have to Survive. We have to protect our stuff. No one will do it for us. No one understands. They should leave us be. They won’t understand. And I don’t want to be alone.

Sally thinks: about Franklin, about Jerry, about Pam and Kirk. About this morning, Jerry picked her up, and about how she was walking to his car, through the yard, and she could feel him looking at her and she slowed down her walk a little bit, and let her eyelids blink slowly, and the sun on her face, and the feeling of Jerry’s looking, and it all felt so nice, and then she got in the car and Jerry made a wise crack, something about Franklin, but not mean, and Jerry spoke quickly, and was trying to be cool, but it was obvious that he was practically giddy, and that made her feel tight in her stomach, like just before the first time he kissed her. Sally thinks: why is this happening? How could this be happening? What has happened to these people?

Figure 2: Internet generated word cloud of Ronald Reagan's 1964 televised address in support of Barry Goldwater.
Figure 3: Internet generated word cloud of Barack Obama's 2004 Democratic convention speech in support of John Kerry.

Part Two (with M. S. Thomas, and Orson Welles)

When Joseph Beuys says, “…what I’m interested in is the process that something emanates from (Two Ladies & Bread], or radiates, or what shall I say, information emanates from it. … that one is in a realm of experience and sensation of which one can have a presentiment of the things that are meant. It suits me that in the beginning they can not be fully grasped…” I want to kiss him and bite his mouth off.

When St. Augustine says, “I know very well what time is as long as no one asks me to define it” I want to give him a high-five. Maybe an around-the-world high-five, like one where you strike hands up high, then follow through in order to also strike hands down low.

When Samuel Beckett says, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” I want him to get in bed with me, lay on his side next to me, elbow on the pillow, eyes looking at mine, his emaciated frame at ease, warm.

The film you are about to see involves wanting to draw, and wanting to make objects, because it’s hard, and uncomfortable, and really nice to be quiet in the studio for a little while and circle ideas.

The film you are about to see posits violent poetic blankness (nature) in scattershot. And nature is a series of major catastrophes. And nature is us. And when you and I address each other with ideas, it is a creative act built as projection. Ordering. Manufacturing value.

When I remember Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment I want to lie down. Or maybe sit quietly at my kitchen table with notebook open. Or grow tomatoes. Or bake bread.

When Matthew Goulish, responding to a description by Alexandra David-Neel of learning rituals in Tibet, says, “It presents us with the frightening possibility that learning only takes place in the presence of the un-learnable” I want to stand with him, shoulder to shoulder, writing notes and folding them into paper airplanes and flying them into the Grand Canyon.

The film you are about to see mostly takes place near rivers, and those rivers are described by the characters who encounter them as both fierce and awesome, beautiful and destructive, dreamy and urgent, home and power.

I admit to being intimidated by other people’s feelings most of the time. I identify this as a certain sort of self-absorption.

I vow to never to refer to performance making as anti-object (anti-market).

I vow to never exhibit performance ‘residue’. This, to me, is the equivalent of a painter exhibiting their used palette, which is not interesting.

I vow never to perform with my clothes off (boring).

Ordering. Ordering. Ordering.

I admit that I want to be above average, and that I’d rather not be middle aged.

The film you are about to see isn’t a film at all, it is a performance, and the people who made the performance are calling it a film and attempting to approximate the performantively impossible, the jump cut, because they are either trying to mimic the cinematic in order to pander to their conception of a contemporary audience or because they are attempting to uncomfortably demonstrate the important difference. The former is always embarrassing, betraying its aim with its palpable delusion; the latter is a boring tautology.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Orson Welles:

“Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it's without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked. Poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”

Part Three: Cloud from old English Clud [mass of rock or earth] (this is Cupola Bobber)

Cloud Seed #1

Dirt, from the construction site where buildings are beginning to be formed, lifts up and moves into the atmosphere. The earth's crust now set loose into the air: a staging ground for the condensation of water vapor, seeds for the formation of a cloud.

No more permanent that anything else. Everything is a momentary apparition. Oh, but beauty. My eyes open each morning, and some mornings are full, like a song that makes me sing along. I am here. I am here. And it will not be forever. Thankfully. Because there is too much to see, and nothing would be worth trying to remember if my eyes will open every morning like a hose spraying infinite nows. Nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime, always.

Cloud seed #2

A man who spent half of his Saturday afternoon kicking a can down the promenade comes home and shakes his jacket before hanging it on the coat rack. Small crystals of salt, deposited on his jacket from the spray of the sea are set loose, moving out of the open window and into the atmosphere. The salt crystals mix with the dust from the construction site, more water vapor condenses, freezes and the cloud is growing.

And looking at The Sea. Looking at the sea. From up here. “And now we are here. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat. The meat sits in the white lake of its dish. The wine waits.” [1]

“Who watched the forms of the clouds over this part of the earth a thousand years ago? Who watches them today?” [2]We will watch and we will try to hold on, but surely they will change. We will cry (tears falling up into the sky), cuss-spittle flying under the cloud’s haunted arches. We will roll in the meadow inhaling mist while stains form on our trousers. We will lay on our backs looking up and listening to the sound of the blades of grass flittering in the wind and remember nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime, always.

Cloud Seed#3

Sitting at the bar at dusk, watching the dusty antiques on the wall loose their definition with the fading of the light; a mass was forming before the drunkard’s eyes. Looking down at his drink, trying to avoid the scene, he suddenly felt an absence forming behind him. He fell off his stool, bumped off a table and a couple of chairs before he stumbled out the door. It was damp outside; it was as if the clouds were sleeping in the street. Trying to make out the shadowy forms through the misty veil before his eyes, he picked a point and staggered towards it. After walking for some time, bumping off of various landmarks-changing his course with each bump, he could feel his body gaining weight from the droplets of water collecting on his skin and clothing, after some time he was swimming in the cloud and after some time he was becoming it.

“What is an any ocean but a multitude of drops?”[3] An awesome body of matter all tangled up more incapable of seeming an object than land, but then there’s air, The Sea as the entropic middle. And this, viewed from a distance, the edge of the universe perhaps, looks like Brownian motion, all of it bouncing around and against itself, changing course, the collection of these glancing blows becoming lives. Matter drifting in the system with the illusion of acting. But one cannot bounce off of belief - and vicious acts, or virtuous acts, are precipitated by belief. But without invoking some grand narrative in which to protect our fragile, why can’t small joy be joy? We can drift, and appreciate the view, and seek to collect these views into a remembered joy, always more is possible in the future, until there is no more future. Smiling into the face of a finite existence of little lasting result, manufacturing small meanings that add up. A joy in having participated instead of being frozen in the want of gifted meaning.

Cloud Seed#4

Down below a couple is sleeping side-by-side, their covers up to their chins. Clouds are forming in front of their mouths with the rise and fall of their chests. Quietly, while they dream their bodies are regenerating tissues. They wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, then look at each other say “good morning” and seeing nothing as changed. But everything has changed. Everything. Clouds. Each morning we wake up and meet our self... meet the world. Our mostly-water bodies, our loose collection of matter, regenerating always. Clouds. “We are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of the world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”[4] But only the crud, none of the actual stuff. And still our hearts hurt when they are broken. Still we collect something. Small, tiny in fact, but ours (us).

An object is like a pattern of movement instead of a solid separate thing that exists autonomously.[5] Look through the microscope and pick your favorite, follow it closely, like a star, like drift wood, like a maybe-face in a cloud. Organization used to be understood as order. Databases, cordoned off, categorized. But clouds. Leaving those things we collect where they lay, and giving them keywords, signs, so that we might search for them later, the algorithm, the duplicitous web (put it in the cloud), cloud computing, more reliable, and more appropriate to our shifting understanding of relationships; time going by, entropic ephemeral re-structuring. Us to the world, us to nature, coffee to the morning, the world to the world.

“As for astronomy, the difficulty of recognizing the movement of the earth consisted in renouncing the immediate feeling of the immobility of the earth and the similar feeling of the movement of the planets, so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of the person to the laws of space, time, and causes consists in renouncing the immediate feeling of the independence of one’s person. In the first case, the need was to renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space and recognize a movement we do not feel; in the present case, it is just as necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel.”[6]

Clouds are like momentary apparitions; their possibility is in the air always, like mist settling down in the cool evening before burning off in new sun. A cloud looks like an object, but isn’t it really just the way air looks when the atmosphere conspires to make it so? You are a cloud.

[1] Strand, Mark. Reasons For Moving, Darker & The Sargentville Notebook. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. p. 75
[2] Thoreau, Henry David. Autumn From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &Co., 1892. p. 429
[3] Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004. p. 509
[4] Eisley, Loren. The Immense Journey. New York: Vintage, 1959.]
[5] Bohm, David. On Creativity. London: Routledge, 1998.
[6] Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. p. 1214

Interlude: Now I'm finally getting going.

house

I want to know a way to feel good most all the time. I am most happy in the wee hours, a little bit more delusional, a little bit more in touch with my desires or contradictions, a little bit more okay with it all. I’m usually trying on something a little bit foreign to me, uncomfortable. Wee hours of the morning with coffee, wee hours of the night with blankets. Maybe I’m trying to read more, better, faster. Or I’m in the water, less clothes than usual and moon a bit brighter than usual. Or I’m…

Is it that it’s always going to be a journey? Is it that it will always be a bit painful? If we’re each a bumper car… don’t we then need to bump other cars in order to sort out the joy in it? Not that the bumping is the thing, but rather that trying is the thing… but it’s hard for me to decide to bump. Or maybe bumping is the thing? Let’s all dance together.

Part Four

Soliloquy for a Shotgun Pattern
followed by A Dialogue Between Myself and a Hole In the Wall.

The most interesting thing about existing in the world is the bizarre flow of emotions that course through me. The most confusing thing about being alive is the uncertainty of my understanding of this system. Is it a system? If I looked at a white wall, I could probably tell you about that wall’s posture and what it says about its attitude. I could do this and I would be confident in my answer, I’d be able to defend it. I would be a little put off if you didn’t agree with me. And that would be fun. That’s all fine, but what about a shotgun pattern?

A wall serves a purpose within a particular structure, that’s where I might start when soliciting its meaning from it (and by soliciting, I mean making up.) The holes left by the spent shotgun pellets are also inert, the impotent residue of lethal violence. These holes got here because someone thought it was a good idea to put them there. We have in front of us the confusion of their frozen chaos that makes us think of their maker, if it is fair to call things that behave by very particular natural laws chaos. Their form (them as image) is not as descriptive as a wall, or a Rorschach test, and so it makes our job of finding in them something to grab onto all the more difficult. But, alas, we can do it. We are born to make what we don’t understand (emptiness) full of what we do. Holes assert their instantaneous terrible violence, like a blank page and lack meaning; like a blank wall, like a present moment, like the past, like the future.

The holes are a series of major catastrophes for those involved (paper), a kind of blank – except for my instigating their being made – that is like the world, like nature. Opaque except for where we can overlay meaning. I can search them for beauty, which is to say discover reason enough to order them with applied marks, reason which overwhelms them but doesn’t efface them. They remain; perplexing, their lacks rendering the applied nature of my imaging (ordering) obvious, and therefore unsatisfying, but also amusing or contemplative in their accumulation, in their few types of orderings.

By representing varied, fragmented versions of totalizing ideologies (or at least aesthetic ideology (metaphorically totalizing)), both original and borrowed, I offer the viewer the opportunity to reflect on the armature or context required for these ideas. Through updates to borrowed artworks, I advance a critique and an embrace. Through pithy statements that attempt utterly honest sentiment, I lay bare those things that most tension my personal ideology – both the collection of signifiers that I use to identify myself in the world (my self-construction), and also my embrace of making as thinking.

Me: (addressing the hole) What do you mean?
Hole: I am a hole.
Me: I can see that.
Hole: And I am whole.
Me: You already said that, I’m not stupid; you needn’t drop your indefinite articles.
Hole: I don’t wear clothes, much less intimate articles, and if I did, I wouldn’t drop them for you.
Me: Holy hell, what are you talking about?
Hole: I’m not hell. Hell doesn’t exist. And if it did, it wouldn’t be a hole. It would be a sphere with no opening. So that nothing could get out. But then, I guess, nothing could get in either.
Me: No, God can do anything. He can probably get you into a sphere with no opening.
Hole: Well, not me, but you maybe. I am a hole.
Me: I can see that.
Hole: But you can’t see me, I am a phantom suggested by a particular shape in another object. In that way I am parasitic. But really, I am materially nothing, the result of materials in motion due to varied causes.
Me: Ah, materially nothing.
Hole: Nothing.
Me: Ordering, ordering, ordering, catastrophe.
Hole: What?
Me: My girlfriend moved out of the apartment last year. She took her paintings, but left the holes they hung from. Those holes could really stare. Hard.
Hole: Holes don’t stare. Holes don’t talk.
Me: Yeah, they stared really hard and sometimes they talked. About things they had seen. They would describe snap shots they had in their photo albums.
Hole: Holes don’t have photo albums.
Me: Yeah. And I would look at the stars and the stars I was looking at were probably dead, the light that was hitting my retina was like a line of light the dead star sent 50,000 years ago. A line of light that points to a hole.
Hole: A black hole?
Me: I don’t know.
Hole: Probably a black hole. Probably lines of disembodied light pointing at a black hole. That makes me think of dark matter.
Me: And once I was driving and was really tired, and it was out west, and it was the highway, and I thought about all of the fences, and all of the fence holes. Lines of holes, arbitrarily laid by law. Lots of holes. And then that made me wonder about houses, bigger holes, and things like that.
Hole: Huh, that’s weird.
Me: And World War One, trenches, sort of like holes. And the Bingham Copper Pit.
Hole: Do you know the story of Doubting Thomas? Yeah, Thomas didn’t believe that Jesus had been resurrected, so Jesus offered to let Thomas stick his finger in his mortal wound. Thomas did, and while his finger was inside he believed. As soon as his finger was out, he doubted the validity of the experience.
Me: Huh. Wanna try it?

Part Five

When Samuel Beckett says of Cezanne, “…he has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but - on the evidence of his self-portraits - with the life… operative in himself” I want to make a pot of tea and start a fire in the fireplace and lay on the floor in my underwear, seeing what I can feel of the life operative in myself.

Catastrophe, catastrophe. Catastrophe.

When Robert Smithson says, “Nature gives way to the incalculable cycles of non-duration” or “Only commodities can ford… illusionist values; for instance, soap is 99.44% pure, beer has more spirit in it, and dog food is ideal; all and all this means such values are worthless. As the cloying effect of such “values” wears off, one perceives the “facts” of the outer edge, the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank” I want to sit on a big rock in Utah with dark sunglasses on my face and hug myself with dirt (pre-history.)

When Elizabeth LeCompte says, “Everything I come up with in my head, I put it on stage. But in 90% of the cases it doesn't work, precisely because it's in my head” I want to engage her in a leaping chest bump that ends on the floor in tears and happiness and sketching in notebooks.

The film you are about to see uses long establishing shots. Of the landscape. Of clouds, of animals, of herds of animals far in the distance, no more than specks of abundance.

The film you are about to see has been made by folks who believe the making of it is their destiny. That this will be their legacy, and that it will be one of greatness, and that the ends justify the means, and if you point at it, or think it, it will be. That becoming is idea-ing.

When Peggy Phelan says, “Performance’s being, … becomes itself through disappearance” I want close my eyes and fail to exactly remember what I was just looking at.

When Gilbert and George say, “We're just Gilbert and George and that's it” I want to stare into each of their pairs of eyes simultaneously and stretch out my two hands, and while still staring, use those two hands to look for - first Gilbert’s, then George’s - warm, moist, suited, armpits.

I vow to appropriate the best of what sticks with me, unapologetically.

I vow to consider my most important artistic act to be making decisions, although a finished work should betray the number of decisions necessary for its making.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Orson Welles:

“Man; naked, poor, forked radish – keep on singing.”

I vow to attempt subversion, even if not outrageously.

When Pascal says, “Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought” I want to become a man with a gun tucked in his waistband, wandering the halls of history, a sweaty search for him.

When Andrew Quick says, “… to encounter the live, or more specifically to experience the live as an encounter, requires a suspension of those systems of understanding that would run ahead of our experience in order to let us know exactly what it is that we are being situated in” I want to plan my day tomorrow, what I’ll get done, and then decide how it will turn out.

When Robert Smithson says, “The tools of technology become a part of the Earth's geology as they sink back into their original state. Machines like dinosaurs must return to dust or rust” I want to stare at my hand, or my coffee and try to see time passing.

The film you are about to see uses all the romance available in an image of the setting sun.

Shots fired. Your gun is empty. The day is dead.

The actors in the film you are about to see are using their bodies as the instruments of their craft, and their bodies are clouds of indiscriminate desires, atoms, dead skin, and belly laughs. They look in the mirror before each shot, the make-up mirror with 3-hinged panels, and their body is a non-site.

I am most happy when my list has been done, or lost, or deemed irrelevant.

I am most happy when the funding application has just been put in the mail.

I want to point at the sky, hard.

When Hal Foster says, “The artist’s “free expression” implies our un-free inhibition, which is also to say that his freedom is mostly a franchise on which he represents freedom more than he enacts it” I want to make Mac and Cheese with molasses in it, and then tell everyone how much I liked Mac and Cheese with molasses in it.

When Tolstoy says, “Renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space and recognize a movement we do not feel… renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel” I want to write him a letter and tell him how he is very right and about how this is why people should make art.

My fictions become my history. And my history is remade in the retelling, until all my days are dead. I only have to lock my front door 12,238 more times and then I won’t have to lock my door again. I only have to get fast food because I didn’t have time to go to the grocery store before it closed 1536 more times, and then I won’t have to get fast food again.

Today, when I remembered Tim Etchells said, “Real people in real time really pretending. The pretence acknowledged at all points. Or the pretence flickering in and out of acknowledgement. ‘Now I am just fooling around with this spaghetti. Now I seem to think it is real. Now this spaghetti seems puzzling to me. Now I’m playing again’” while walking down the street lost in my own thoughts, I realized that every half block I would remember that I was walking down the street and that there were people all around, and I would speed up my slowed pace. And then I would get lost in my own thoughts. And then remember everyone else again and re-speed up. And then I would get lost again, and then remember again and then re-speed up. And then I would get lost again.

END

More statement, March 2010 [thesis catalogue with thesis repetition]

When St. Augustine says, “I know very well what time is as long as no one asks me to define it” I want to give him a high-five. Maybe an around-the-world high-five, like one where you strike hands up high, then follow through in order to also strike hands down low.

When Samuel Beckett says, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” I want him to get in bed with me, lay on his side next to me, elbow on the pillow, eyes looking at mine, his emaciated frame at ease, warm.

When I remember Ilya Kobokov’s installation The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment I want to lie down. Or maybe sit quietly at my kitchen table with notebook open. Or grow tomatoes. Or bake bread.

When Matthew Goulish, responding to a description by Alexandra David-Neel of learning rituals in Tibet, says, “It presents us with the frightening possibility that learning only takes place in the presence of the un-learnable” I want to stand with him, shoulder to shoulder, writing notes and folding them into paper airplanes and flying them into the Grand Canyon.

When Peggy Phelan says, “Performance’s being, … becomes itself through disappearance” I want close my eyes and fail to exactly remember what I was just looking at.

When Samuel Beckett says of Cezanne, “…he has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but - on the evidence of his self-portraits - with the life… operative in himself” I want to make a pot of tea and start a fire in the fireplace and lay on the floor in my underwear, seeing what I can feel of the life operative in myself.

When Elizabeth LeCompte says, “Everything I come up with in my head, I put it on stage. But in 90% of the cases it doesn't work, precisely because it's in my head” I want to engage her in a leaping chest bump that ends on the floor in tears and happiness and sketching in notebooks.

When Gilbert and George say, “We're just Gilbert and George and that's it” I want to stare into each of their pairs of eyes simultaneously and stretch out my two hands, and while still staring, use those two hands to look for - first Gilbert’s, then George’s - warm, moist, suited, armpits.

When Robert Smithson says, “The tools of technology become a part of the Earth's geology as they sink back into their original state. Machines like dinosaurs must return to dust or rust” I want to stare at my hand, or my coffee and try to see time passing.

When Hal Foster says, “The artist’s “free expression” implies our un-free inhibition, which is also to say that his freedom is mostly a franchise on which he represents freedom more than he enacts it” I want to make Mac and Cheese with molasses in it, and then tell everyone how much I liked Mac and Cheese with molasses in it.

When Tolstoy says, “Renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space and recognize a movement we do not feel;… renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel” I want to write him a letter and tell him how he is very right and about how this is why people should make art.

More statement, June 2009 [Dedalus Foundation Statement]

Goals and aims of my work

Nothing lasts, and much of what goes on in the world is ridiculous, but we can experience joy. We can be temporary, small even, and still find incredible joy - not in the paranoid invention of some eternal time, not in some fantastic dispute with our condition - but in our memories, in our daily interactions, in the wit, beauty, opaque complexity, and tragedy of nature. If we admit that we do not understand much in the world, and do not justify this lack of understanding with fantastic sophism, we can instead feel alive in our situation, purpose in our investigations, responsibility in our commitment to each other, and joy through our meak experience of it all.

Samuel Beckett says of Cezanne, “…he has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but - on the evidence of his self-portraits - with the life… operative in himself.” [1]

And Robert Smithson says, “Nature gives way to the incalculable cycles of non-duration.” [2]“Only commodities can ford… illusionist values; for instance, soap is 99.44% pure, beer has more spirit in it, and dog food is ideal; all and all this means such values are worthless. As the cloying effect of such “values” wears off, one perceives the “facts” of the outer edge, the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank; in other words, that infinitesimal condition known as entropy.” [3]

I am interested in a poetics of the particle, whereby an individual particle can plausibly have been everything before, and could be everything again. A poetics that doesn’t assume scale, but can be applied at any scale. The particle, as I see it, can stand for any entity: an individual, for dust, for planets, for solar systems. This open-ness allows for an evaluation of their similar orientations to the universe, and as temporary manifestations of matter. Further, the particle - as science proceeds - proves itself to be a universe unto itself. Space isn’t infinite, matter cannot be destroyed, and there is nothing that doesn’t come from something… matter is recomposing, losing a little bit of energy as it continues to move.

In my work, I hope to activate this poetics of the particle in order to provoke contemplation of bleak systematic nature and our relationship to it. That this relationship is always dynamic, that we make guesses and generate assumptions, that we cannot help but project meaning (Smithson’s “values”) onto our experiences of the world, but that these manufactured relationships are at once useful and ridiculous. The work is always somehow in motion, active to different degrees. This is important as it mirrors everything else in the world, like a particle, always in motion, rather than appearing to be static, outside of nature. Often the work uses mundane materials which operate simply to achieve the suggestion of sublime or idealized nature. That the work is mere suggestion offered simply allows it to be at the same time touching and ridiculous.

In execution, I am primarily interested in material, the most essential unit of the work. Material can communicate a tuned austerity of information which when activated and contextualized (and then re-contextualized) can become a sublimely convincing screen which asks viewers to project upon it. A tarpaulin doesn’t look like a wave, but can perform a wave convincing enough to trigger a viewer’s cultured reaction. Drawing on paper is its own sort of projection. A focus on material, and how material functions in the play of projecting meaning onto the world is one common theme in both the collaborative work I’ve been involved with before school and something I hope to gain greater command of in the studio work I’ve been developing in at Northwestern.

Discussion of specific pieces (work samples)

In my Shotgun Pellet Cloud drawings, I start with shot shotgun pellet clouds and their nature-like violent randomness. I draw on the BACK of the punctured paper and display them in a light box with the lighting cross fading between front spot lighting, and the light box’s interior light. The front light emphasizes the texture/object of the paper, the violence and action of the punctures, and hides the ink drawing. The lighting from inside the box shows the ink drawing on the back of the paper, and obscures the paper’s surface. The fade from front light to interior light happens suddenly, then the interior lighting slowly cross dissolves (decays) into front only light, ad infinitum. The suddenness of the transition from front light to interior light mimics the shot of the shotgun, and also the *magic* of “finding” meaning in randomness commensurate (Beckett’s Cezanne) to ourselves. The dissolve then mimics the decay of the pertinence of such projections of meaning, again only leaving the featured object and its natured randomness.

In It Has Been, Will Be Again, I project a scrolling text video stating things this pile of sand could have been, or could be, onto that pile of sand. The text starts simply: a tree stump, a coffee mug, a brick. As it continues, the text proceeds to incrementally emphasize the subject doing the projecting and the sentiment in this ascribing; “the section of the ceiling you look at wanting sleep, thinking about sleep, but not sleeping. Looking instead at this section of ceiling.” This piece agrees that everything will be reduced to dust, and makes the possibility inherent in nature’s cyclical action something of possibility instead of dread while also being critical of our sentimental reification of objects.

In Drifting Candy Cloud, (conceptualized with Stephen Fiehn as Cupola Bobber[see bio]) I hang a modest cotton candy cloud on an elastic rope stretched to maximum length by the weight of a water-filled bucket. There is a white rectangle projected on and around the cloud, creating the shadow of the cloud within a white rectangle on the wall behind it. The cloud is therefore set up to drift very slowly; as the water in the bucket evaporates making the bucket lighter, the elastic rope ever so slowly recoils pulling the cloud across the projected white rectangle. Depending on the humidity in the room, it could take the cloud from 1 to 4 days to travel from one side of the rectangle to the other. As the cloud is made from cotton candy, which slowly turns back into hard sugar when exposed to air, the cloud’s surface also changes over time becoming more rounded and lumpy - less wispy and light looking. Looking up at the clouds and making out objects is probably one of the most rudimentary and playful ways we subjectively project on to nature. In this case, one must project the image of the cloud onto this object in order for it to function (or perform) for the viewer.

Wave Machine #2 (made collaboratively as duo Cupola Bobber[see bio below]) is a durational performative sculpture made for variable public spaces; parks, public squares, car parks. Made of three square tarpaulins sized to either overwhelm or appear tiny in a specific site, the sculpture is activated by a single performer pulling on ropes attached to a pulley at one corner of the tarps. The ropes both creates a wave and returns it. The sound of the plastic tarpaulins moving in the air and against each other generate the most convincing effect: the sound of waves rising, crashing, then retreating. The visual display is more a poverty of information, a mere suggestion of a sublime moment with the sea. Yet it is affecting to encounter it in some public space where it does not belong, and is playful enough to accomplish an emotional and physical response similar to that felt at the seaside - one that the viewer ascribes to it. We allow the suggestion to take us over, we want to see it, and in order to “see it” we fill in the image to generate the sublime effect.

[1] Coetzee, J.M., 2009. The Making of Samuel Beckett. The New York Book Review, LVI, Number 7, 15
[2] Flam, Jack, ed., 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press. p 67
[3] Flam, Jack, ed., 1996. p 13

Statement on Intention; January 25, 2009
Formal, edited

This statement is an attempt to write about the aims I have for my artwork, and the interests that inform it. It is artificial to say this is absolutely descriptive, or that I do not contradict and fail executing, intentionally or otherwise, statements I make here. Failure is here viewed as productive. Perhaps it’s more apt to title this, “Statement On My Aspirations for Artistic Work and Interests Forced Into a Clear, Concise, and Linear Telling, OR Platform For Future Unforeseen Failure”.

Primarily, my work uses a nostalgic pastiche of varied sources and historical voices to create time-based performance work that focuses on the viewer’s body as the place of looking. I’m interested in working slowly to strive for a new aesthetic that celebrates the beauty found in imagined mythic nature and abstracted minutiae, but failing. Connections between oneself and the world can be forged wherever we look, and this act of creating and projecting interior meaning (especially in the face of awesome nature) is fertile ground for work that ruminates on the construction, and importance, of constructed meaning.

I choose the mode of performance because I believe in the extra-power of Live, and a more analogue relationship between sublime internal experiences of nature and the form of performance. Time-based, Live work more easily skirts the illusion of permanence. The ephemeral fade of the experience directly invokes (but does not fully simulate) the questioning of experience and memory the work relies upon as it’s departure point. The theme of Live is further leveraged through soft performative endurance, wonkily constructed props, rehearsed spontaneity, and other decidedly shaky formal aspects.

The work generates commentary on the contemporary condition through a programmed juxtaposition of sources eschewing traditional narrative emplotment, asking for and requiring the viewer’s investment in the experience. Working slowly is a strategy used to combat my natural inclination to overdo, instead slowly discovering a more austere form for the work. Much of the original impulse for the work fades to make way for themes more successfully tuned to a wide viewership; a more generous work.

Statement on Intention; January 11, 2009
Formal

Using a nostalgic pastiche of varied sources and historical voices to create time-based performance work that focuses on the viewer’s body as the place of looking, I’m interested in working slowly to strive for a new aesthetic that celebrates the beauty found in imagined mythic nature and abstracted minutiae, but failing. Connections between oneself and the world can be forged wherever we look, and this act of creating and projecting interior meaning (especially in the face of awesome nature) is fertile ground for work that ruminates on the construction, and importance, of constructed meaning.

I choose the mode of performance because I believe in the extra-power of Live, and a more analogue relationship between sublime internal experiences of nature and the form of performance. Time-based, Live work more easily skirts the illusion of permanence (although my work aims at a repeatable and reliably made viewer experience) serving to heighten the immediacy of the experience in the viewer’s body (not by direct intervention). The ephemeral fade of the experience directly invokes (but does not fully simulate) questions of experience/memory the work relies upon as it’s departure point. The theme of Live is further underscored through the use of soft performative endurance, wonkily constructed props, rehearsed spontaneity, and other decidedly shaky formal aspects.

Choosing to present appropriated and manipulated nostalgic sources and texts, and to go so far as to mime aspects of those sources, serves to provide a quasi-historical perspective on the work’s content while allowing for a more complex encounter than a telling or straight appropriation of the source would allow. Further, the work generates commentary on the contemporary condition through a programmed juxtaposition of these sources, the editorial nature of choosing sources, the original context of the source, contemporary issues in the mind of the viewers, and the primacy of the visual/performative built/assembled context.

Working slowly is a strategy used to combat my natural inclination to overdo the work, instead discovering a more austere form for the work. By working slowly, much of what is generated for a given work is thrown away, rather than incorporated. Much of the original impulse for the work fades to make way for themes more successfully tuned to a wide viewership; a more generous work. This is important because the place of looking is in the body of the viewer and the work’s aim is to build an experience for the viewer, and must therefore invite the viewer into it to properly resonate with and affect the viewer’s body. Without affecting the viewer’s body, the work remains an elaborate anecdote unworthy of the viewer.