airform archives

a sad day for l.a.

2012-02-03T04:19:00.000-08:00

very sad to hear about mike kelley’s death ... although i have this nagging feeling that if i am sentimental in any way, he’ll come back either make fun of me or kick my ass.

i was fortunate to meet mike and work with him as a student in both undergrad and grad school. when i started undergrad school, mike was one of the few links i could look to between the punk scene and the art scene, and as a teacher, his studio visits, tended to be either unbelievably brilliant - he was surprisingly good at pointing out a problem area in an abstract painting - or vague and frustrating - offering comments like “i don’t know... that green just kind of bugs me...”

during grad school, he wasn’t on my committee, but whenever the student who had the studio next to mine was late for a meeting, mike would end up in my studio, offering thoughts on what i was working on. he had an incredible knack for making off-the-cuff comments that i would end up thinking about for ages... as his ability to break a work down formally was pretty freaking brilliant.

i remember him looking at a painting of mine when i was an undergrad, telling me that i was being too precious about certain areas, and that if i did something once i could do it again, pushing me not to be afraid to paint over things that i liked, so as not to get too attached to certain parts... ten years later, i was sharing a studio with another artist who was incredulous at my ability to paint over things i’d spent weeks working on; and while i don’t believe that everything i do in the process of a painting can be replicated - i have continually reaped the benefits of kelley's advice towards not being afraid to destroy individual gems for the sake of the whole...

certainly, in terms of the vast gap between our work, we didn’t agree on much, and i’m pretty sure he had little interest in my work in grad school - especially where it was coming from. i wrote my thesis as a piece of fiction that was unabashedly influenced by writers like rilke, robert walser, par lagerkvist - and i remember during my final thesis meeting with the entire faculty, he badgered me about the text - not so much the content, as much as i think he was kind of disgusted with the connotations of the 19th century style, and i remember in the midst some of the other professors discussing the work in academic terms, he blurted out: “i don’t know why you didn’t write it in surfer talk.”

at the time, i figured he was just trying to push my buttons and steer the conversation somewhere else, but in the end, his comment began to weigh on me, and i realized he was, once again, trying to get me to realize that a certain kind of preciousness can be dangerous, debilitating, and growth stunting... a very important lesson that enabled the work to move forward... and i have no doubt that there is a large group of former students who are now better artists for having worked with him.

i first saw his work when i was a student at otis, probably around 1983, and a group of us went to see a show of his work at rosamund felsen. we were completely blown way by this concoction of paintings related to plato, the rothko chapel, rainbow afro wigs, stoner imagery, abraham lincoln, etc. and then there was the way one had to navigate to enter the installation... by laying down on the floor and shimmying beneath a painting, in order to end up in a space that was essentially a visual clusterf-ck. while at first it all simply seemed like he was taking the piss at gallery conventions and upending one’s expectations (all of which it did!); but it also offered a bunch of wide-eyed newbies an alternative path - for this was way beyond any kind of conventional commercial gallery experience that any of us had ever had. while i admit that i had no idea what the hell i was looking at - the whole thing reeked of a complex web of decisions - and the objects themselves were belligerent while at the same time kicking some serious butt, especially to a youngster who had entered art school through the back door of the punk scene. what appealed to me most was that this work was how it seemed to be bucking the status quo, and how the work made sure that people would be unable to offer a casual response.

kelley's work always resonated with a deep sense of tension and conflict - generally snubbing its nose at you on the outside, while offering a rich space of provocation, rejection, exploration and ultimately resonance on the inside. no matter the initial response, there was always this slow and layered conversation that would ensue after seeing the work... (just like the studio visits). i never walked away from the a show of his work without thinking about it for a long time... although there was always a reckoning before an embrace.

we also shared a music connection - and although i left the punk scene for quieter realms, there was still this shared consciousness of the residue of having been part of it... offering a great mistrust of “the system” as a whole. i'm sure that his ascension to the highest levels of a world that was once truly alternative and is now simply commercial (or in truth, simply commerce) was filled with conflict, even though he clearly rose to prominence on his own terms.

more than anything, i’ll never forget seeing him perform with destroy all monsters, screaming the go go gopher song as loud as he possibly could, over and over again, while pounding the hell out of a big marching band drum - walking back and forth across the stage somewhere between an angry 6 year old and a shaman, fully immersed, fully possessed.

he was a presence that will most definitely be missed!

bury on slowness...

2012-02-01T16:18:00.000-08:00

"speed limits space, slowness multiplies it... two slownesses gently grazing each other even go so far as to rub against each other. we dare henceforward speak of such activity no longer in terms of geometry, but almost in the language of the boudoir... in such an atmosphere, caresses are born, are renewed. multiply... only linked slownesses have the capacity to create, keep alive and re-create these foreseen and unforeseen contacts... a slowness plus a slowness does not equal a quickness: on the contrary, they become intensified, they transmit to each other their slowness, adding to each other in order to measure themselves, in terms of mechanics, by a subtraction... two globes on the scale of slowness: it is air, fire, earth and water which bear the weight of the measure."

excerpts from a statement by paul bury in studio international magazine 1965

some weiwei

2012-01-20T10:20:00.001-08:00

"...yes ceramics is kind of crazy. i hate ceramics... but i do it. i think if you hate something too much you have to do it. you have to use that."

"i think poetry is for keeping our intellect in the stage before rationality. it brings us to a pure sense of contact with our feelings. at the same time, of course, it does have a strong literary expression; but the most important thing is that it brings us to the innocent stage in which imagination and language can be most vulnerable and at the same time most penetrating."

"... nothing was planned. the most beautiful thing that ever happened in my life was by coincidence and not by plan. and it often happens because you don't plan. if you have plans, you only have one go. if you don't have plans, it often turns out well because you've followed the situation. that's why i've always jumped into unprepared situations, the most exciting condition."

"... i want the size to be more like the scale of furniture, which can be put in any place. you can't identify it; it's not you're familiar with. it's more like a foreign object because you don't know its usage, but its made to such high quality that you can't ignore its purpose. but its purpose is you don't know. i feel it's very interesting to put a tremendous effort or art or craftsmanship into something useless or even nameless..."

from the penguin paperback: ai weiwei speaks with hans ulrich obrist

when footsteps form islands...

2012-01-13T18:52:00.001-08:00

sssssssshhhhhhhh........

2012-01-11T18:53:00.000-08:00

dan flavin's nightmare & robert irwin's nightmare

2012-01-09T17:24:00.000-08:00

everybody needs a bit of...

2012-01-06T17:29:00.001-08:00

when entering the ear protection zone...

2012-01-05T15:51:00.000-08:00

various small gradual fires and resonant milk...

2012-01-03T12:40:00.000-08:00

i'll be starting my year in hong kong for an upcoming installation at the new run run shaw media building designed by daniel libeskind for the city university of hong kong. the installation is part of a series of exhibitions called "white walls have ears", my installation opens january 12th.

...

Ed Ruscha’s second seminal picture book - Various Small Fires - was self-published in 1964, and is a quintessential early Los Angeles icon. Like Ruscha’s book, I was born in Los Angeles the year it was published.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about this book - not only in relation to my own history; but how each image in the book speaks, evokes, and continues to open up. Because the book contains no text nor explanations, various small fires offers an open experience, with little resolve - a series of generic images of fires and one glass of milk, supposedly from “stock photographs”.

Fire, like sound, has a physical form that is relatively un-graspable and constantly changing. Both can feel ephemeral, quiet, loud, aggressive, beautiful, moving, dangerous, moving, growing, evaporating, smoldering, smoking - and both can influence one’s experience of a landscape.

For me, Ruscha’s book is less a narrative and more a trajectory of encounters; where turning the pages of a small book is akin to wandering through various rooms and corridors of an architecture.

Thus, I have built a series of “small fires” (and one “milk”) of colored plexi-glass and sound, in an attempt to converse with Daniel Libeskind’s design of the recently completed building - each in a different location, so as to allow for unexpected encounters.

The sculptural forms are a kind of “mash-up”, exploiting certain formal characteristics of both the architecture and the photographs towards new architectures and new fires. There has been no attempt to illustrate the forms, as much as allowing these sources to generate analog responses - as if the images in the book and the design of the spaces could be used as scores.

Somehow I keep thinking of fires in relation to Steve Reich’s text “Music as a Gradual Process”.

My own audible fires were built upon a base of field recordings of fires made several years ago in Denmark and California that have been languishing for years in the gargantuan pile of field recordings. Other sounds used include acoustic objects, small electronics, and some instruments. The approach to repetition and evolution over time, attempts to engage Reich’s text as well.

My hope is that these “fire-sites” will offer a site for casual listening, less a destination and more a kind of happening upon... where one might stop to sit near a fire, and get lost in the resonant “flames”. the works seek to create spaces of pause, towards active listening and quiet mediation.

more info: here

first flea market find of the new year...

2012-01-01T12:34:00.000-08:00

unbelievably wonderful 8" x 10" photo, probably early 60's, unknown location, unknown photographer, unknown sound of rare beauty emanating from man and black box...

sound in space...

2011-12-21T16:51:00.000-08:00

above are images of the backside of a page of original art by vicente alcazar from the 1976 comic mag "space 1999" published by charlton in 1976. the art is from a story called "the infinity mechanism", where the crew manages to kill a robot-alien infiltrator by sending hi-frequencies of sound through the speaker system of the space station.

what is strange and wonderful about the art is that during the proofing of the text, someone cut out the word "sound" and flipped the tiny piece of paper over, so that the letterer could replace the word "sound" with the word "ultrasonic" - which is how the page appears in its published form.

of course i love is this back side, and how the forms of the art-inks bleeding through the paper merge with that solitary word: sound. it is as if the stains and the word were somehow intentionally brought together.

the bubble has landed!

2011-12-18T16:53:00.000-08:00

very excited about my friend jeffrey head's new book from princeton architectural press on the bubble houses of wallace neff - no nails, no wood! jeffrey has been working on this project for a long time, and has put a ton of energy into the book, and it is great to see it realized.

neff's experimental domes, built using his patented "airform construction" process, have been vastly ignored by the modern architecture community, so the book will most certainly be a revelation for those that know only neff's spanish styled mansions. while neff was more known during his lifetime for these traditional home designs - many built for movie stars - the architect believed that he would be remembered more for these experimental dome shaped shelters.

the book is filled with rare archival photographs and a ton of information - both historical and technical; charting the various bubble projects in the usa, as well as worldwide. (and yes, our house pictured, and i wrote a tiny preface.)

it should be in bookstores this weekend.

the sound of IKB...

2011-12-12T06:43:00.000-08:00

VIII. the blue cries of clarles estienne:

in 1957, i made a short 16mm film about my exhibitions of the blue period. i needed a commentary, preferably spoken by an art critic. so i asked charles estienne if he would willingly shout blue cries for the twenty minute duration of the film. the longest and most voluminous blue cries possible, drawing inspiration from the paintings in my studio at rue campagne premiere. this proved to be very successful and i must say that the film will retain the prestigious commentary that charles courageously pronounced with such profound conviction at the time. these are restrained cries, long enough and vigorously sustained (he requested two weeks for practice before the recording). to give an approximate idea of the cries alone: they are somewhat reminiscent of the cries that sailors shout out at regular intervals in order to avoid collisions in dense fog"

yves klein from: overcoming the problematics of art, the writings of yves klein

this sunday... book signing and performances...

2011-12-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

very excited about this event at LACMA's Art Catalgues bookstore with artist stephen prina!

Stephen Prina and Steve Roden at Art Catalogues
Sunday, December 11 | 4 pm

Artists Stephen Prina and Steve Roden join independent curator and writer Laura Fried to discuss the artists' recently published books as well as music, painting, and the potential, process, and principles of translation. Stephen Prina’s multifaceted practice encompasses painting, installation, photography, sound, and film. He has also had an acclaimed career as composer and pop musician. Steve Roden draws on various forms of specific notation—from language to musical scores to maps—and renders them through self-invented systems into new scores, which then take form in his painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound compositions.

The program will begin with a special piano performance by Stephen Prina and a short improvised sound work by Steve Roden.

Free, no reservations; seating is limited

To pre-order books and CDs, please call (323) 857-6587 or email artcatalogues@lacma.org.

new web piece

2011-12-05T14:03:00.000-08:00

the kind folks at parallelograms invited me to make a work for their site. if you don't know them, they send an artist 5 or 6 images found on the web and the artist then picks one and makes a work responding to the image... the work is then hosted on their site...

i used an image of the disneyland monorail (see above), and here's a bit of text i sent to the parallelogram-ers:

"weirdly, i got in the mail the day after i decided to go with the monorail image, a box of sheet music from a friend who was going to toss it. the first sheet music i saw as i opened the box was "bridge over troubled water" ... so the film is sort of a mash up of the sheet music and some info on the monorail's history from the disneyland site. some of the images are related to the monorail's path based on the photo you sent, and the rest is all cut ups from the sheet music... nice to make something that one cannot make sense of... but i hope it manages to offer a little poetry along the way."

click here

then click on the monorail picture to see/hear the piece

i would highly recommend snooping out the past projects on the site, particularly my friend stephen vitiello's sound piece which is stellar! but there is lots of goodness...

when trees say goodbye...

2011-12-01T16:37:00.001-08:00

in the crazy wild wind of last night, many of the trees here lost large limbs, and some trees were uprooted entirely.

two of the largest branches that fell from the sky landed on the flagstone path, near the front door, and two of the largest that hit the flagstone left marks.

as you can see, these are quite beautiful drawings, certainly not too distant from the japanese calligraphic marks that might've been part of a jisei - japanese death poem, written down or recited in the last minutes before death.

son house

2011-11-25T08:28:00.000-08:00

i'll be your mirror...

2011-11-22T14:04:00.000-08:00

among the rainniar eht gnoma
and lightssthgil dna
i saw the figure 5 erugif eht was i
in golddlog ni
on a redder a no
fire truckkcurt erif
movinggnivom
tenseesnet
unheededdedeehnu
to gong clangssgnalc gnog ot
siren howlsslwoh neris
and wheels rumblinggnilbmur sleehw dna
through the dark city..ytic krad eht hguorht

william carlos williamssmailliw solrac mailliw

out of context, into mind...

2011-11-12T12:27:00.001-08:00

meanwhile, not far away, at the state prison: "i must think harder -
concentrate on my thoughts - make my tentacles obey me!"

new sound installation...

2011-11-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

i currently have a new sound installation up at art center's williamson gallery in pasadena. the show runs until january 15. the sound piece was created using recordings i received from JPL, and an old LP of recordings of the ionosphere via tape recorders circa 1955.

the exhibition was curated by stephen nowlin, and contains some wonderful work by semiconductor, michael c mcmillan, rebecca mendez, and others.

you can see images of some of the works in the exhibition, along with my sound on this youtube clip...

more goodness from the pompidou's recent acquisitions

2011-11-06T04:19:00.000-08:00

"the japanese painter ryochi shigeta lived in paris from 1958-64, and theni boxton before returning to japan in 1966, and showing tokyo his first investigation on curved and cyindrical surfaces.
in 1969, masaomi unagami director of printing-ink manufacturers dainishi sieka sugested that he continue his researches on the two chimneys of his factory, and ryoichi shigeta thus shifted his focus from the decoration of traditional japanese pottery to industrial architecture. with his monumental motifs and the contrast of complimentary colours - orange and blue - he destructured the volumes of the chimneys. treated in this supergraphic manner, these became color signals in tokyo's industrial landscape."
museum wall label...

when sensibilities are shared...

2011-11-02T02:37:00.000-07:00

a few days ago i was lucky enough to visit the pompidou, and they had a whole slew of recent acquisitions on display. as i walked into one of the galleries, i was elated to see several of andre cadere's "round wooden bars" from the mid-1970's. i have always loved these works - both their visual aesthetic as sculpture and the performances he did by carrying these works with him to openings, or placing them in the street, etc. they always seemed perfect to me, but i have seldom found a way to articulate why my response to them has always been so strong.

as i moved from the sculpture, i gravitated towards a painting on the adjacent wall. as you can see from the image, there are a number of consistencies between this painting and a number of my own. when i looked at the wall label to see whose work it might be, i was floored to discover it was an early work of cadere's!!! for i had never seen an image of anything he made before the "round wooden bars" ... and had no idea he began by making abstract paintings! and so, the uncovering of this early work suggested that my deep response to the "round wooden bars" over the last 20 years was not just an awkward coincidence, an interest in the proposition of provocation nor a simple aesthetic response to the minimal nature of the work (something i respond to quite strongly, but have never really been able to negotiate within my own paintings) - but is instead a kind of uncovering of an unspoken shared sensibility.

even the wall text felt relevant to my own work: ... "he was making a kind of op art with folkloric and psychedelic touches... introducing the play of chromatic permutations..."

of course, i am not in any way suggesting that cadere's work and my own are consistent, or that i am somehow contextualizing myself within his stature; but nonetheless, it is a wonderful thing when you find these deeper connections to a work and/or artist you respond to. in discovering this painting as a piece of cadere's beginnings, i begin to feel closer to him, and i acknowledge (as i hope that he would too if he were alive) that there is something clearly shared.

in truth, the painting really just made me happy that one of my heroes feels a little bit closer to my own feeble path...

when i become very small i would like to live here...

2011-10-31T00:36:00.001-07:00

jean philippe lenclose, auditorium maquette, 1967

one more new thing... (well, not really a thing, but you can still hear it even though you can't hold it)

2011-10-25T14:09:00.001-07:00

dear friends,

10 years ago i released a CD on line called "forms of paper". it was the first composition i had ever created in collaboration with a computer. the piece was originally created as an installation - built from the sounds of handling book pages. the original 8 channel installation was then mixed to stereo for CD release.

while the disc was very well received by reviewers and sold out rather quickly, my inadequate skills with the computer left me quite unhappy with overall sound of the release. several months later, while discussing some of this unhappiness with bernhard gunter, he offered to re-master the piece with the warmth that i missed, and he gave the piece a healthy dose of presence, which it was most definitely lacking. while i was elated with bernhard's mastering at the time, there wasn't really a reason to re-release the disc so soon, and so bernhard's re-master was simply stored in my archive (i.e. desk drawer) for 10 years...

now, on the 10 year anniversary of its initial release, line has invited me to release bernhard's re-master of forms of paper as a high quality download, and i am quite excited to finally have the piece go out into the world wearing its fancy clothes!

along with the release of the remastered music, i have written a nice long text on the history of the piece, as well as its relationship to the beginnings of the lowercase scene - all of which was were beautiful designed into a pdf by line's head honcho, richard chartier.

take a peek here for details!

fur julius...

2011-10-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

at 7pm at the hamburger bahhof in berlin on october 28th (this friday) will be a celebration of artist rolf julius, who passed away earlier this year.

participants include:
peter ablinger, arnold dreyblatt, fast forward, felix hess, christina kubisch, hans peter kuhn & junko wada, bernhard leitner, david moss, rie nakajima, robin minard, michael moser, steve roden, akio suzuki, miki yui.

some of the participants will be performing (myself included) while others will be playing recordings and/or videos.

the event is free

benjamin and berlin and possibly quiet...

2011-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

i'm going to be in berlin for the next 4 weeks. much of my time will be spent looking at walter benjamin's notebooks and notes, exploring mostly symbols, incidental marks, visual systems, etc. towards a new body of work. the blog will either be quite active, or a bit asleep.

more events coming soon...

2011-10-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

1.
"WORLDS" (a group exhibition)
as part of: AxS 2011: PASADENA FESTIVAL OF ART AND SCIENCE
October 14 - January 15, 2012

Opening reception: Thursday, October 13
8pm, speaker: Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, author of "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming." followed by a reception.
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
Art Center College of Design
1700 Lida Street (hillside campus)
Pasadena, California 91103

i will be showing a new 2 channel soundpiece entitled: rain static in hanover, which was created using 1955 LP containing ionosphere recordings and contemporary recordings of sunspots.
---
2.
Brick + Mortar International Video Art Festival, curated by Christoph Cox
Friday October 14, 2011, 5:00-10:00 pm
Saturday October 15, 2011, 1:00-8:00 pm
Greenfield Mass, various sites
Artists: Manon De Boer (NL), Seth Cluett (US), Tony Cokes (US), Luke Fowler (UK), Jesse Jones (IE), Paul Lindale (UK/US), Kara Lynch (US), Mirko Martin (DE), The Otolith Group (UK), Jenny Perlin (US), Mathias Poledna (AT), Raha Raissnia & Charles Curtis (IR/US), Steve Roden (US), Billy Roisz (AT), Julian Rosefeldt (DE), Simpson/Meade (US), Miki Tajima (US), Su-Mei Tse (LU), and Daniel Warner (US
The Brick + Mortar festival takes place in Greenfield, an historic mill town in western Massachusetts. Transforming the city’s downtown into a temporary arts district, the festival presents video projections and installations within a variety of extraordinary architectural sites that are in various stages of renovation. Presented by ConjunctionArts in partnership with local businesses, the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, the Greenfield Business Association, Greenfield Community College, and Five Colleges Inc., the festival is free and open to the public.
i will be showing my film 'striations', shot on 16mm with mary simpson, and recently shown at the sculpture center.

PLEASE NOTE I WILL NOT BE PRESENT AT EITHER EVENT.

this thursday and friday... AxS festival

2011-10-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

hello all,
i've curated an evening of performances, which will happen this thursday and this friday night at art center's wind tunnel space on raymond, as part of the pasadena AxS (art and science) festival:

information on the performers, etc. below, and all events are FREE!

IGNITE / FLOW |
AxS Festival Commission
Admission is free.
Reservations suggested.

Reservations click here

at the Wind Tunnel Gallery
Art Center College of Design South
950 South Raymond Avenue

Thursday, October 6, 8pm
Friday, October 7, 8pm
FREE!

here's the blurb:

IGNITE/FLOW, curated for AxS FIRE and WATER by visual/sound artist Steve Roden, features three commissioned works by four remarkable interdisciplinary artists: Mark So, Yann Novak and Robert Crouch, and Carole Kim.

The commissioned artists were asked to respond to the FIRE and WATER theme as well as the Wind Tunnel Gallery site on the Art Center College South Campus (home of the Graduate Media Design program).
--
READING ILLUMINATIONS | Mark So
Composer Mark So presents READING ILLUMINATIONS [readings 41], a sonic exploration of fire and water elements in visionary post-romantic poet Arthur Rimbaud’s dizzying collection of prose poems, performed both nights by Mark So with Julia Holter.

FATA MORGANA | Yann Novak and Robert Crouch
Mutii-media performance artists Yann Novak and Robert Crouch present FATA MORGANA – a kind of fragmented travelogue, reconstructed through video and audio field recordings using sound and multi-screen projection surfaces.The performance mirrors the rare and complex Fata Morgana mirage phenomenon which hauntingly inverts the boundaries of figure and ground over both desert lands and seas.

SCAN | Carole Kim
Carole Kim presents SCAN, a highly textured work incorporating live performers, real-time cameras, feedback loops, soundscapes, original music scores and computer-controlled projections on a multi-planar 3D cloud-like structure that will break down the projected image into particulate fragments. This hybrid space folds the actual into illusory – producing an ephemeral environment designed to crack open our normal perceptions of spaces and containments . . . including the human body.
--
Free - but reservations are highly recommended!

new thing...

2011-10-04T07:13:00.000-07:00

i have a new cd release on the line label, called proximities. here are some notes:

Proximities was recorded in 2010 during my time as the artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. I began by recording a performance of a series of tones played on an old battery powered Paia Oz synthesizer with a built in speaker, determined by the letters A-G as found in a text by minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. I recorded the tone sequence several times during sunrise, amidst 50 of Judd’s stainless steel sculpture in an old army barracks that has been converted into a museum. The performances were recorded with an H4 digital recorder, my iPhone and also a cheap Sony micro-cassette recorder. The space was one of the most resonant i have ever been inside of.

During each successive performance/recording these small recorders were emitting the sounds of previous performances through their tiny speakers. At times I also hummed. Obviously the process owes much to Alvin Lucier's seminal work "I Am Sitting In A Room." Essentially, the piece is an accumulation of field recordings, and not only is the space itself audible, but also passing cars, etc. All of the processing in the recordings was "acoustically" generated by simply playing the sound in an extremely resonant and uniquely sounding space. The occasional popping sound, many of which can be heard at the end of the piece, are the sounds of Judd’s sculpture expanding while the sunrise begins to change the temperature within the space.

the cover image is from a failed film project/experiment, also created at chinati, using the same vowel structure as i used to generate the music to determine arrangements of colored gels.

the cd is available directly from the label, or from the usual outlets. you can also hear excerpts on the line site and see images taken during the recording process.

a few suggestions if you are thinking of buying me a present...

2011-09-30T04:50:00.001-07:00

images from moma's current fluxus show. if you are in the nyc area, it is even worth the ridiculous price of admission...

sublime skulls...

2011-09-23T18:54:00.000-07:00

two beautiful frottages by max ernst from a 1936 publication of je sublime by benjamin peret. ernst continues to slay me with his experimentation... not to mention these look like punk rock flyers from the late 70's.

when on kawara saw two animals in antanakos' studio...

2011-09-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

"two tortoises in the studio of stephen antonakos this afternoon"

"two or three men knocked on the door of my apartment tonight. without opening the door, i asked 'what's wrong with you?' one of them said, 'it's all right you are there'."

"this afternoon dan graham dropped a letter into the mailbox at the corner of eldridge and grand streets in ny."

"i have a dull pain in my eyes"

"dan graham brought joseph kosuth to my apartment this afternoon."

"jiro takamatsu called me this afternoon when i was reading 'ninjabugeicho'."

"my letter from ray johnson was postmarked somewhere in new york city this afternoon."

some of the more cryptic and diaristic captions from on kawara's 1967 date paintings, which for the most part are captioned by fragmented found text from newspapers of the day that the paintings were completed. the bits above not only stand out for their biographical nature, but the blunt approach to sharing seems to wholly compatible with the seemingly obvious but truly hermetic paintings themselves.

when there were haters of quiet music...

2011-09-18T04:02:00.000-07:00

while organizing the mess that is my computer, towards a re-release of one of my most requested out of print cds, i found a note that was sent to me circa 2002, related to a wired magazine article on so-called "lowercase music" - a term that wikipedia claims i invented, but which in truth, was a term i used to describe something quite different. i will share the true story of the term and its meaning another day, but for now i thought it would be nice to share this note in response to my own work as well as the work of my "cohorts"...

Hi,

I just listened to some sound clips of various artists from the Wired.com website of Lower Case Sound & they mentioned your album Forms of Paper which I went to the webpage they had linked for that & read about your album.

I have a couple of things to say to you:

Are you serious? This is not music, in fact it's not even sound FX. If you guys were actually doing something then I might be impressed. I worked in L.A. in the music industry & I heard a lot of crap but this is not even that. What's the point of buying a CD that has nothing on it except a few random barely audible noises that I can make on my home DAW setup. I am thoroughly disappointed with this lame idea especially when music & audio in general needs a serious artistic movement to revive it. You & your cohorts are pretending to be serious artists that have a alternative to all the groovebox beat music that is out there. What you are doing though is truly nothing & the only statement you are making is that you really have no talent or ideas to present. If you really want to change the way people listen to sound then you must actually make something for them to listen to first. Not really a very novel idea but I think it works.

when guitar godesses rise up from a pool of light...

2011-09-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

when needful things are found in seemingly lesser things...

2011-09-16T10:49:00.001-07:00

this rugged crater
alive with
sounds

...and listen

sounds come
from within the
rocks

follow the almost
hypnotic lure of music...

music

rrrrrrrrr
crash
krak
bam
powpow
eeee

echoes in the sill air!
do you hear me out there?

i still can't believe my ears

and in peaceful silence.

when music moves from organs to strings...

2011-09-09T07:13:00.000-07:00

achingly beautiful rendition of arvo part's pari intervallo, originally written for a pipe organ, here transcribed for the finish kantele - sounding less like a gold crowned church and more like a small wooden box made by a shaker...

some upcomings...

2011-09-06T13:30:00.000-07:00

some upcoming events as i journey from one coast to another...
september 7, 5-8 pm
opening reception for the group exhibition: game theory
cornish college of the arts,
seattle washington.

september 8, noon
artist talk
cornish college of the arts
main art gallery - free

september 8, 7 pm
performance
cornish college of the arts
main art gallery - free

october 1, 6:30 pm
issue project room benefit art auction
at industria superstudio
more info here
i will be doing a short 10-15 minute performance early in the evening.

when cage attempted to apprentice fischinger...

2011-09-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

"Galka Scheyer had introduced Cage (and Edgar Varese) to Fischinger shortly after his arrival in America (1936) in the hope that Cage might provide Fischinger with some original and modernist music more suited to the extraordinary, radical potential of his animations. Fischinger, round and jolly as a Chinese Buddha, explained to Cage that he had tried writing sound himself a few years earlier by drawing ornaments and photographing them into the soundtrack area of film so that their inherent spirit, that gave them visual shape, might also be released to give them equivalent auditory values. This notion that each object contained its intrinsic sound spirit - undoubtedly articulated with bilingual aleatory whimsy - intrigued Cage immensely and led him to embark on his percussion pieces. When Cage proposed doing a soundtrack of percussion music for one of Fischinger's films, Fischinger suggested that Cage should actually work on animating a film to better understand the process and potential of the medium: that incredible freezing of time, and that tedious thawing. Cage dutifully came to observe and help Fischinger on his current work-in-progress, Optical Poem, for which dozens of paper objects were suspended on strings throughout the deep space of a stage area. Cage's lesson involved taking over from Fischinger the long pole topped by a chicken feather with which each circle would have to be moved to a small, even increment, then steadied to motionlessness in preparation for the next exposure. Fischinger merrily sat beside the camera, puffing his smoke, supervising, waiting for the next take. But in the hands of a novice, the set-up took such a long time! Gradually Fischinger dozed, and his cigar, falling to the floor, ignited some rags and papers lying nearby. Cage seized a bucket of water and splashed it over the fire, coincidentally inundating the camera. That was the end of John Cage's apprenticeship in film (though Fischinger wrote him a few years later asking if he had ever done a suitable music track)."

via calvin thompkins, the bride and the bachelors

from aztec to english, from definition to poem...

2011-08-31T09:49:00.000-07:00

ruby-throated hummingbird:
it is ashen, ash colored. at the top of its head and the throat, its feathers are flaming like fire. they glisten. they glow.

amoyotl (a water-strider):
it is like a fly, small and round. it has legs, it has wings; it is dry. it goes on the surface of the water; it is a flyer. it buzzes. it sings.

bitumen (a shellfish):
it falls out on the ocean shore; it falls out like mud.

seashell:
it is white. one is large, one is small. it is spiralled, marvelous. it is that which can be blown, which resounds. i blow the seashell. i improve, i polish the seashell.

a mushroom:
it is round, large, like a severed head.

the cave:
it becomes long, deep; it widens, extends, narrows. it is a constricted place, a narrowed place, one of the hollowed-out places. there are roughened places; there are asperous places. it is frightening, a fearful place, a place of death. it is called a place of death because there is dying. it is a place of darkness; it darkens; it stands ever dark. it stands wide-mouthed; it is widemouthed. it is wide-mouthed; it is narrow mouthed. it has mouths which pass through. i place myself in the cave. i enter the cave.

from the 11th book of bernardino de sahagiun's "general history of the things of new spain" (florentine codex) translated from the aztec into english by charles e. dibble and arthur anderson, 1963, via "some/thing" issue 1, spring 1965, titled "found poems" by jerome rothenberg.

ruscha on photo books and small fires in 1965...

2011-08-28T07:10:00.000-07:00

What is your purpose in publishing these books?

To begin with – when I am planning a book, I have a blind faith in what I am doing. I am not inferring I don’t have doubts, or that I haven’t made mistakes. Nor am I really interested in books as such, but I am interested in unusual kinds of publications. The first book came out of a play with words. The title came before I even thought about the pictures. I like the word “gasoline” and I like the specific quality of “twenty-six.” If you look at the book you will see how well the typography works – I worked on all that before I took the photographs. Not that I had an important message about photographs or gasoline, or anything like that – I merely wanted a cohesive thing. Above all, the photographs I use are not “arty” in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes. I don’t mean cinema photography, but still photography, that is, limited edition, individual, hand-processed photos. Mine are simply reproductions of photos. Thus, it is not a book to house a collection of art photographs – they are technical data like industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots.

Is there a correlation between the way you paint and the book’s?

It’s not important as far as the books are concerned.

Was it necessary for you, personally, to take the photographs?

No, anyone could. In fact, one of them was taken by someone else. I went to a stock photograph place and looked for pictures of fires, there were none. It is not important who took the photos, it is a matter of convenience, purely.

What about the layout?

That is important, the pictures have to be in the correct sequence, one without a mood taking over.

Do you know a book called “Nonverbal Communication” by Ruesch and Kees?

Yes, it is a good book, but it has a text that explains the pictures. It has something to say on a rational level that my books evade. The material is not collated with the same intent at all. Of course, the photographs used are not art photographs, but it is for people who want to know about the psychology of pictures or images. This (“Various Small Fires”) IS the psychology of pictures. Although we both use the same kind of snapshots, they are put to different use. “Nonverbal Communication” has a functional purpose, it is a book to learn things from – you don’t necessarily learn anything from my books. The pictures in that book are only an aid to verbal content. That is why I have eliminated all text from my books – I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of “facts”; my book is more like a collection of “readymades.”

You are interested in some notion of the readymade?

No, what I am after is a kind of polish. Once I have decided all the detail – photos, layout, etc. – what I really want is a professional polish, a clearcut machine finish. This book is printed by the best book printer west of New York. Look how well made and crisp it is. I am not trying to create a precious limited edition book, but a mass-produced product of high order. All my books are identical. They have none of the nuances of the handmade and crafted limited edition book. It is almost worth the money to have the thrill of seeing 400 exactly identical books stacked in front of you.

excerpts from a 1965 conversation between ed ruscha and john coplans from the february 1965 issue of artforum, regarding ruscha's second book, various small fires.

when land is like sea...

2011-08-24T22:33:00.000-07:00

the wind rises, screaming faintly, intensely against the north side, and the old house creaks.

"the hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel."

and in a letter, he (melville)

"i have a sort of sea-feeling, here in the country, now that the ground is covered with snow. i look out of my window in the morning while i rise as i would out of a port-hole of a ship in the atlantic. my room seems a ship's cabin; & at nights when i wake up & hear the wind shrieking, i almost fancy there is too much sail in the house, & i had better go on the roof and rig the chimney."

and again, at another season,

"in summer too, canute-like: sitting here, one is reminded of the sea. for not only do ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still august noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the barbary coast, an unknown sail."

paul metcalf, quoting herman melville (his great grandfather), in genoa, 1965

music and image as an instantaneous process...

2011-08-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

"performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles:

pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest.

turning over an hourglass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom.

placing your feet by the sand in the ocean's edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them."

text: steve reich's music as a gradual process.
images: first picture to come up in a google image search for each reich's 3 descriptions.

more wind to listen to...

2011-08-16T10:18:00.001-07:00

i was recently invited by the wire magazine to do a small web exclusive related to my recent book from dust to digital (i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces).

click here to see a few images that i received too late to add to the book, and several 78's from my collection that didn't make the cut for various reasons...

some fragments of an introduction...

2011-08-04T17:34:00.000-07:00

"a remembered event is infinite, because it is merely a key to everything that happened before and after it."
w. benjamin

"he could find himself in the only environment in which he could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say, entirely outside of time"
m. proust

"the fairy in whose presence we are granted a wish is there for each of us. but few of us know how to remember the wish we have made; and so, few of us recognize its fulfillment later in our lives"
w. benjamin

"proust listens attentively for the echo of the past; benjamin listens for the first notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past"
peter szondi

"technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relationship between nature and man"
w. benjamin

bits from translator's forward and introduction to walter benjamin's berlin childhood around 1900, belknap press, harvard, 2006

some early visual heroes...

2011-07-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

over the past few weeks, thanks to my good friend dan's obsession with the comic books he read as a kid, i have recently found myself mired in looking back at some of the comic books i also read. i have to admit that the hours i spent with these things when i was young were much more involved with looking than reading (in fact, i seldom actually read these things), but these intimate visual experiences were certainly seminal in terms of the development of my own graphic resonance as a visual maker. they were the first human made images that i responded to, and of course, some of the first images i tried to copy.

my time with comics was relatively short... i bought new comics for two or three years starting in 1971, and after not really caring about them for 2 or 3 years, sometime around 1975 i got into comics again, mostly buying back issues from the 60's. it was during that second phase that i started to appreciate and know the names of certain artists i liked, and at that time i became obsessed with the work of jack kirby.

(neal adams)

attempting to look back in time to draw memories out of these objects was a complex experience. while certain pages or covers instantly offered emotional earthquakes, sometimes i'd look at a cover of a book i have owned since childhood and could not identify with the contents in any way. in other cases, the cover would instantly send me to the room i was sitting in when i devoured its image, or i could see the store where i stood looking at the rack of books before making the decision of which one to buy.

(neal adams)

looking at the work of my three favorite artists now, i am completely blown away by the experimental ways these guys broke up their pages - as they seldom broke a page into 9 neatly uniformed panels. as a painter who is also constantly looking at different ways of breaking up a rectangle, i am humbled by their abilities to continually re-invent the space and the narrative tactics of a scale and size that was the same every time.

(neal adams)

the two artists that had the most impact on my memory were neal adams and jack kirby. adams was the one i was obsessed with earlier on. my first comic, an issue of batman with cover and inside drawings by adams, was purchased for me by my grandmother in 1970, and that book was the beginning of my interest in both comics and adams' work. for some reason, i was particularly enamored of his work on several issues of green lantern that revolved around a drug addiction story (i have no idea why or how i was so into such a thing at age 8... but his cover art for green lantern 86 still kills me). adams style is tight, "scratchy" and generally feels very connected to classical life drawing - his lines are, at times, so fine they almost feel as if they were was etched into the paper. this is not to say the work wasn't exploratory, aggressive, and experimental... for it certainly was. but looking at his work now, i marvel at its technical brilliance, especially the way he drew the figure, and the work is unbelievably crisp. he was also a master of emotion.

(neal adams)

an even more colossal figure for me, as well as tons of folks who read comics in the late 70's and early 80's, was jack kirby, and there is no disputing that his work was some of the most innovative and personal in the history of comics - certainly from the 60's forward. when i started digging through the childhood comics i had saved since childhood, a ton of them were drawn by kirby. his dynamic use of line is wholly unique, and when inked by the right inker, the work is unmistakably different than everything else. kirby, more than anyone - at least to my mind - was constantly building his own visual world like an outsider artist; who, rather than replicating a "brand" determined by a publisher, consistently created images through a language that was uniquely his own. sure, at times he towed a party line, or an inker tried to genericize his work; but for the most part, once you have seen kirby's work you can spot it a mile away.

(jack kirby)

graphically, his sense of space can be claustrophobic, and his linework aggressive and heavy (not heavy handed!). everything in kirby's work seems to have weight and gravity - not just beings, but his lines as well. his images of machines tend to be more interesting and inventive than most modern sculpture, and his style was always about vision much more than technique. he was the first and only artist experimenting with collage in the 60's, and the work always seems to be pushing things beyond what is already known and accepted. in truth, once kirby was allowed to not only draw, but also write his books, there has never been anything stranger (just look at the murdering misfit below!) or more personal in mainstream comics ever. everything about kirby's work completely slays me.

(jack kirby)

what is sad is that for much of his career, kirby was a genius working in an industry that reviled personal vision in the same way that contemporary hollywood approaches filmmaking - where creative decisions are generally made by committee in relation to what an executive thinks the public wants, rather than allowing the film or book to simply be the voice of a visionary. in the 70's kirby was able to do a lot of amazing things - mr. miracle, machine man, kamandi, new gods, etc. but one has to wonder how much more he could've done if the industry had acted less like an industry much earlier on in his career.

(jack kirby)

it wasn't until i started looking at my old comics again that i re-discovered gene colan, an artist who was anonymous to me as a kid, although like the books kirby and adams had drawn that i saved, a remarkable number of also-remembered images were drawn by colan... and i have recently been reacquainting myself with his work, which is incredible.

(gene colan)

unlike the strong graphic presence of adams and kirby, colan's work rarely exists in a flat world. it always feels ephemeral and in motion. yes, the graphic qualities of his work are tremendous and similarly innovative (once you know his work, you can also spot it a mile away); but colan's strength, to me, is its dynamic, ephemeral and motion filled world. in a previous post, i reprinted an interview with colan in relation to his listening to films while he was drawing; and his pages tend to express a kind of impossibility of ever grasping the passage of time. the work doesn't rely on the sequential images, like a flipbook, as much as his perspectives, fragmentation, abstraction and agitated compositions suggest the instability of time and bodily motion. much of this is expressed in his unique approach to the shape or posture of a body within a frame, and for me, colan's work always seems alive. looking at these pages, they feel as if you return to one an hour later it would somehow be changed. where kirby's work approached the abstract through a graphic and mechanical presence, colan approached the abstract much more like a futurist, all simultaneous motion and flux.

(gene colan)

sadly, just as i was beginning to re-immerse myself in these artists' works a few months ago, colan passed away. like kirby and adams, colan was certainly a visual genius, rarely producing identical approaches to the page like a machine, and consistently pushing the potential of the page and exploring different ways an image could speak. in essence, he brought the whole medium forward. if you look at graphic novels and recent comics you will see less and less traditional approaches to frames and panels, and i really think colan's work was one of the earliest to disrupt the frame in such a way - and particularly because his career was long, he has been incredibly influential.

from the few interviews i've read, colan seemed not only down to earth, but remarkably honest about his process. he was also a pretty darn interesting thinker. i can't remember reading an interview with a comic artist from the silver or bronze age period who was so articulate about his interest in trying to expand the language of narrative in ways that might intentionally confuse a viewer - and to use that confusion to expand a drawing's potential for interpretation. to achieve such a thing colan sometimes moved towards abstraction in his panels to suggest that a reader might have to look a little longer. as a kid who seldom read the words in comics, colan's images certainly allowed me to jettison the story and to fall deeply into the images.

here's another great bit of relevance from the same interview i posted a week or so ago (click here to read the entire interview):

COLAN: Well, the biggest complaint that Stan ever had about my work was that he didn’t have an easy time understanding what I was drawing. There’s a lot of confusion about my work. [Laughter.] And I meant it to be a little confusing. You don’t always understand what you’re looking at even when it’s a photograph. Like a room with many things on a desk. You can only identify a few of the objects but you can’t say what they all are. Some books might be there, an inkwell might be there.

RODMAN: It all lends to the atmosphere.

COLAN: But it all lends to the authenticity of what you’re looking at. In life, you don’t notice everything at one time. Certain things – and the rest you don’t know. You don’t even think about. So I try to do that. If there’s a fight scene, and it’s in the dark, I try to confuse it so that you see arms and legs but you don’t know who they belong to. A fight is a confusing thing to begin with. Tables and chairs are overturned. You shouldn’t be defining everything for the reader. The reader is not an idiot. He gets out of it what he wants to get out of it. And if it thrills him to see all these puzzling pictures, then I’ve accomplished something. At least that’s how I viewed it anyway, personally. Someone would say to me, “Yeah, but, who does this belong to? Whose leg is that?” I said it isn’t important. Put any connotation you want on it.

when a comic artist is also an audiophile...

2011-07-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

excerpt from a great interview with comic book artist gene colan, where he talks about making audio recordings:

RODMAN: I’d expect someone of your generation to be more into Big Band music or pop standards of the 1940s. You appear to have a pretty eclectic CD collection. I used to work at a record story, and my co-workers would play White Zombie just to torment me.

COLAN: Some of it’s modern. Modern symphonies. A lot of Prokofiev. Let’s see, I’m trying to think of some things.

RODMAN: But you don’t exclude hard rock on occasion?

COLAN: Oh, anything. My son is into that. They have some real psychedelic music. [Laughs.] And I play that, you know. Anything that fits in – with impact – almost all of it fits in. I’ll even play sound effects records. I have sounds of the ocean, trains – stuff like that – planes.

RODMAN: Does it help you with the “movie” that’s going on in your mind?

COLAN: Yeah, if it’s a war film I’ll play battle sounds. [Laughter.] It’s some real peculiar stuff I had a project or in those early years, and I would rent a film and then I would record the soundtrack on audio tape, and I’d play back the entire film without actually being able to see it. All I could do was hear it. It was a lot like listening to a radio program. And a lot of a movie depends on what you see, not so much what you hear. During a silent passage, you wouldn’t know what was happening unless you’d seen the film. I had seen every film I ever recorded, so it helped bring it back.

RODMAN: You penciled a story by Steve Skeates called “The Scream from Beyond,” which dealt with an obsessive/compulsive sound effects guy. It ‘s from the Marvel horror anthology comic from 1970, Tower of Shadows [#6], where they occasionally ran stories introduced by the artists, with a framing device of a self-portrait at the drawing board. Your hobby as an audiophile is, in fact, a part of your Bullpen reputation.

COLAN: Early on when I was working for Timely, we’d kid around during the day. We’d fool around more than we worked. But I did a dramatized [recording] where we’d go in and ask Stan for a raise, Stan Lee, and I had sound effects where he’d throw me through the window. I had it rigged so you would hear glass breaking. I had a wire recorder. In those years it wasn’t tape, it was wire. So I would dramatize the whole thing out at home, with the music and sound effects. I brought it in, and everybody got a big bang out of it. Including Stan. I didn’t want to play it for him. I thought he’d throw me out. [Laughter] But the guys in the bullpen said, “Oh, come on. He’s a regular guy. Go ahead and play it for him.” And I did. He got a charge out of it.

you can read the entire interview: here

images: details of the original art for pages 27 & 28, gene colan (pencils), don adkins (ink), the scream from beyond, from tower of shadows, marvel comics, 1970

slight return...

2011-07-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

when i first got out of grad school (1989) i was making purely intuitive abstract paintings, and was adamant about not allowing any pre-existing imagery or conceptual structure to enter the process and/or conversation. after about 3 years i hit a wall, and realized i needed to find a way to create more conflict for myself - there was no tension in my intuitive process, and hence, i was starting to feel a kind of helplessness... that i was setting myself up to make the same painting every time for the rest of my life.

in a fit of frustration, i grabbed a magazine, and tried to build an image using several small graphic design elements from the table of contents, and i became interested in the idea of taking something out of its existing context, and attempting to give it new life as an abstract form - so that it might speak in a voice less intended. it was an an attempt to open the image to a more interpretive response, and in a way, it was one of my beginnings...

a few days ago, i received the map pictured above in the mail, along with some old photos, and other ephemera. i purchased the lot because i wanted a photograph that was part of it, but as i went to recycle all of the things i did not care to add to the massive pile here, i noticed this graphic on the little map, and it grabbed hold of me, offering a feeling i had not thought about in a long while while.

as i was standing over the trash, deciding whether or not to toss the little map, i realized my immediate response to the image - specifically to its shape and color - was a strong one; and so, after throwing away the rest of the "junk", i walked back to my studio and pinned it on the wall.

i have no idea whether or not it will end up in a painting, but it was a good reminder that while one tends to always be focused on the process of growth and evolution, it's important to remember that the distance you have traveled from your beginnings is never quite long enough that you can't turn around and see where you've come from...

images:
top: santa anita horse racing track map as found
bottom: santa anita horse racing track map with information erased

cage on elevator music...

2011-07-13T10:10:00.001-07:00

"one of the things we nowadays know is that something that happens (anything) can be experienced by means of technique (electronic) as some other (any other) thing (happening). for instance, people getting in and out of elevators and elevators moving from one floor to another" this "information" can activate circuits that bring to our ears a concatenation of sounds (music). perhaps you wouldn't agree that what you heard was music. but in that case another transformation has intervened: what you heard had set your mind to repeating the definitions of art and music that are found in out-of-date dictionaries. (even if you didn't think it was music, you'd admit that you took it in through your ears, not through your eyes, nor did you feel it with your hands or walk around inside of it/ perhaps you did walk around inside of it: the architecturality of music is now a technical possibility and a poetic fact. "

john cage, happy new ears, a year from monday 1967

performance at lace thursday night

2011-07-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

LACE and VOLUME present:
ezekiel honig, steve roden, the infinite body
thursday night july 14, 7-9 pm
three solo sets.
more info: here

coming soon from dust to digital...

2011-07-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

"i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces."
arriving august 2.
more info here

more on field recordings...

2011-07-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

"suddenly dissatisfied with the fluid form that had evolved in the fifth [symphony], he [sibelius] began to dream of a continuous blur of sound without formal divisions - symphonies without movements, operas without words. instead of writing the music of his imagination, he wanted to transcribe the very noise of nature. he thought he could hear chords in the murmurs of the forests and the lapping of the lakes; he once baffled a group of finnish students by giving a lecture on the overtone series of a meadow..."

alex ross on sibelius in the rest is noise.

found on the ground...

2011-07-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

talks on painting...

2011-06-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

sunday night at the mandrake in culver city, i'll be part of a panel discussion about painting with tom lawson, brett cody rogers, amanda ross-ho, moderated by jill newman. should be a lively evening...

talks on painting: painters beyond painting,
sunday june 26, 7pm
mandrake bar
2692 la cienega blvd.
culver city.

debussy on simplicity and truth...

2011-06-22T00:29:00.000-07:00

in 1901, debussy told his colleague paul dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex - "they smell of the lamp, not of the sun."

from alex ross: the rest is noise, listening to the 20th century.

when fences speak...

2011-06-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

can't stop looking at this image from a 1960 reynolds aluminum fence catalog... found a week ago... my mind wandering... images layered, yet still visible complete... as if a model of the crafting of a painting...

cage on the power of things...

2011-06-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

what changed matters, made conversation possible, produced cooperation, reinstated one's desire for continuity, etc., were things, dumb inanimate things (once in hands they generated thought, speech, action).

john cage, art & technology, 1969

from the palace at 4 am...

2011-06-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

"i whirl in the void. in broad daylight i contemplate space and the stars which traverse the liquid silver around me... again and again i'm captivated by constructions which delight me, and which live in their surreality - a beautiful palace, the tiled floor, black, white, red under my feet, the clustered columns, the smiling ceiling of air, and the precise mechanisms which are of no use. [and further] once the object is constructed, i tend to see in it, transformed and displaced, facts which have profoundly moved me, often without my realizing it; forms which i feel quite close to me, yet often without being able to identify them, which makes them all the more disturbing."

alberto giacometti, 1933 (as quoted in "a concise history of modern sculpture")

miniature playhouses for a very small audience

2011-06-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

cigars clamped between
their teeth:

i've read that goethe, hans christian andersen, and lewis carroll were managers of their own miniature theatres. there must have been many other such playhouses in the world. we study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one.

(text from charles simic's absolutely stellar: dime-store alchemy, the art of joseph cornell
drawings by goethe, hans christian andersen, and lewis carroll.)

to induce surrealist dreams...

2011-06-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

i picked up a 1975 issue of art news at the flea market on sunday for a buck, mainly because it featured a small article on richard smith; but the real discovery was an ad for a max ernst edition pictured above, called the "cage-bed with screen."

the bed and screen were made in an edition of 99, published by modern art associations, and was exhibited at leonard hutton galleries from february to march of 1975. the edition included: the bedcover (made of mink fur), the sculpted "cage" bed frame, and the screen which contained 2 signed lithos.

i haven't done much research on this, but until this morning, it was an ernst endeavor i'd never come across. i believe it is one of the few environments he created in the latter part of his career - somewhat hokey and kind of related to some of the environmental and furniture pieces that dali editioned late in his own career, although not nearly as lame.

while it would be easy to sneer at ernst's attempt to bring some of his most ernstian imagery into a weirdly victorian installation context, i find myself thinking it is actually pretty interesting - not because it resonates any stronger than his paintings or collages (it definitely doesn't), but because it is pretty darn interesting that someone who worked with dream imagery for much of his career, would create a sleeping environment that could be purchased and installed in anyone's home (anyone who had the dough and the room of course...)

what listening looks like...

2011-06-03T07:19:00.000-07:00

a small collection of old business cards...

2011-05-30T06:02:00.000-07:00

voice culture and harmony, circa 1890

victrola sales and distribution, circa 1920

unique log house roadside attraction, 1940's

herman miller furniture, circa 1950
(card most likely designed by irving harper)

big daddy roth rat fink, circa 1965

creative playthings, toy company, 1970's

(or... sound as ritual towards harmony, recording and listening, working with hands outside of convention or social culture, designing the world as if you mean it, participating in a truly alternative culture, creative thinking towards creating making...)

2 poems with yellow by harry martinson (and two lines that kill me)

2011-05-26T05:04:00.000-07:00

far from here:

i want to send a dream far from here.
the swallows fly high there.
perhaps your wheat ripens
and through the yellow oceans of rye
a slow humming sound of bread can be heard.
this is a world of water and stones,
my hand is without bread and i count its lines.

1934
--

beach murmurs:

something black and hard
grabs something yellow.
is it a barrette holding thick, beautiful hair together?
no, it is an anchor, half-buried in the sand on the coast of Lister.

there are footprints everywhere.
they disappear into the sea.
the winds divide your heart,
the wind of the ocean and the moor's mountain everlastings.
as evening comes, for someone longing
the sunset in the west is the sun's own westward journey.

longing stretches the self
into winding ribbons around the earth.
longing is derived from long, length and a long time.
longing is that which is lengthened.
where are you yourself?
after the waves have roamed with you?

1945
--

glass house of yesterday...

2011-05-23T06:51:00.000-07:00

architect: george fred keck, chicago century of progress 1933-34...

blinky on my mind...

2011-05-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

during the last few weeks of blinky palermo's survey, i was invited by lacma to write a guest post on the show for their blog. i have loved palermo's work for a long while, but i had never really tried to write about it, particularly because it was always difficult to articulate my responses - always feeling that the work (especially the early pieces) approached an experience that felt stubbornly wordless. eventually, this inability to write with clarity about palermo's work suggested that i simply let the works speak for themselves, and so in a kind of ridiculous way, i ended up "documenting" a conversation between two works that were hung adjacent to each other: butterfly two and blue disc and staff (which you can read here).

as i exited the last gallery of lacma's palermo survey, i encountered a small vitrine featuring a 1969 edition that palermo did with gallerist rene block called "blaues dreieck" (blue triangle). the piece is deceptively simple: the box containing a stencil of a triangle shape, a blue tube of paint, a brush, and a print. more info on the print can be seen at greg.org (strangely posted on my birthday!), but the instructions in the box suggest one stencils a blue triangle above a door, and then "give away the original sheet"... suggesting the paper stencil can be used to place triangles over numerous doors and on numerous structures.

i was recently invited to participate in a group show at the sculpture center called "time again" curated by fionn meade. over our many conversations regarding the show and what i might include (we ended up with a new sound work for the courtyard, a painting, a recent film, and 16 drawings from a series of 50 that had never been shown). fionn had asked me if they could reprint my blinky text in the catalog, and i realized that more often than not, palermo's work has tended to make an appearance in most of our conversations... so it was no surprise that we were once again moving around with blinky as a kind of anchor point.

"time again" included a 1971 piece by palermo titled "projektion". the piece is basically a photographic document of a projection of a red and blue painting onto the front of what appears to be the facade of an apartment building. the final image (a still photograph) is quite uncanny, and like most of palermo's work as described above, the piece is rich in potential wanderings, yet unable to evoke within me anything that i could articulate in terms of how or why it managed to resonate so strongly. for the installation at the sculpture center, the palermo is hung on the right side of a T shaped wall and my painting hung on the left - with the "stem" wall separating them. basically, if you stood a foot or so from the bottom of the T's stem, you could see both works together, with the thin edge of the stem between them. thus, while a viewer could stand at a distance and see both together, the artworks themselves are always separated physically from each other.

obviously, i was ecstatic to be part of such a conversation (moving suddenly from an invented conversation between two of palermo's works, towards seeing a conversation occur in real time between a work of palermo's and my own.) on the surface, the painting is pretty close in scale, as well as even somewhat related in color, to palermo's photograph; but what is more interesting is their relationship to architecture and site.

palermo's "projektion" seems to shift certain conditions of an existing architecture through the addition of color and light, while my painting was the first that i have made that was directly influenced by the existing architectural conditions within which it was made (i.e. i could not have been made the painting anywhere else as its visual motif was built through my conversation with specific visual qualities of the space). in this way, palermo and i begin to talk about both painting and architecture in relation to ideas of site specificity, and in particular, i believe that as these works create a kind of conversational ouroboros around architecture and painting, where blinky imposes a painting upon an architecture, while in my own work an architecture is allowed to impose itself upon a painting.

as i started to think more and more about blinky's "projektion", i found myself coming back to "blue triangle" - and how both blue triangle and projektion change an architectural situation by adding color and skin. both are somewhat guerrilla actions - though not necessarily of desecration, but more a kind of "dress-up", with blue triangle becoming something of a fake moustache, and "projektion" a kind of evening gown.

while one can find many "folk" precedents for blue triangle - pennsylvania dutch hex symbols, hobo signs, etc.; "projektion" seems a precedent itself for the more public realm of recent projection, such as doug aitken's piece for moma, and the projections thrown onto the new museum which i could see from my hotel. the difference, of course, is that palermo's piece was static, and its "motion" could only occur through the user, through his or her movement around it (i.e. exploring the flat image as architecture, and proving once again that the term "interactive" does not always have to include various bells and whistles ).

in thinking about "projektion's" projection, i realize that blinky manages, once again, to approach a kind of intimacy through stillness and touch - as if the projected painting was gently laid over the facade like a blanket for a slightly cold night. it suggests that the work is not only about how the painting affects the building, but how the building affects the painting...

on the morning of my departure from ny, while walking to get some coffee, i passed a construction site contained by blue large painted walls with several small cut-out windows in the shape of triangles. of course, these openings felt like an inverted version of "blue triangle". as i looked through the openings towards the site (which felt like visiting a secret place), i felt as if i were holding palermo's stencil for blue triangle, and using his frame to see the world.

i then tried to stoop down as much as possible so as to look upwards and still be able to see through the triangle, hoping for a vantage point that would allow me to see the sky through a blue triangular frame - to potentially see blue within the blue, although knowing full well that these two blues would not blend into the full blown monochrome i was suddenly seeking...

perhaps in the end, it is this situation - where one finds a kind of inability to fit things together that gives palermo's work its richness... re-enforcing for me, that a condition of "resolve" or "stability" in an artwork is highly overrated.

2 in ny soon...

2011-05-02T06:37:00.000-07:00

i'll be in ny for two events this coming week...

1.
time again - a large group show curated by fionn meade
at the sculpture center, 44-19 purves st. long island city.
opening reception: sunday may 8, from 5-7pm
i will be showing a group of drawings from 2007, a recent silent film shot on 16mm, and a new sound installation for the courtyard.

2.
tuesday may 10 at 10 pm:
improvised sound performance with rob millis of climax golden twins
at the stone, corner of avenue C and 2nd st.

working memos as fragments of gold...

2011-04-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

"the noises must become music"

"be sure of having used to the full all is communicated by immobility and silence."

"your film - let people feel the soul and the heart there, but let it be made like a work of hands"

"no intellectual or cerebral mechanism. simply a mechanism."

"not to use two violins when one is enough"

"images like modulations in music"

"practice the precept: find without seeking"

"to translate the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing."

"make visible what, without you, might never have been seen"

" how to hide from oneself the fact that it all ends up on a rectangle of white fabric hung on a wall? (see your film as a surface to cover)"

ten from robert bresson's notes on the cinematographer

forfour4fore...

2011-04-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

guest posting all week on four for the day: here

better than an easter egg...

2011-04-24T00:55:00.000-07:00

robert breer is one of my heroes, another thinker worker in a variety of mediums, two of which i am quite fond of - his films and his "floats". pictured above is documentation of breer's floats that were part of numerous exhibitions, but most importantly seen here as part of EAT's pepsi pavilion for expo 70 (some links: here, and here ).

below the images of expo 70, are a few pages from a 1970 brochure of breer's show at gallery bonino, which was made up of 93 miniature versions of breer's larger float sculpture.

the bottom pics are of one of my most coveted objects, one of breer's small floats, as sold by MOMA as some kind of toy or open "edition". i've never seen any other mention of the MOMA toy (unfortunately mine does not work!), but much about it can be gleaned from breer's short statement in the bonino catalog:

"in 1966, i made three small self-propelled dome shaped sculptures. these later served as models for the group of 6ft. high sculptures sent to expo '70 as part of the EAT (experiments in art and technology) project for pepsi co. inc. a large edition of a 4" high working scale model has been produced in japan and will be imported here.

in the meantime, i have taken 93 of these units and changed each one into the individual pieces that make up this exhibition."

clearly the moma float is one of the japanese imports breer spoke about as the toy was manufactured by bandai - the famous japanese model and toy manufacturer. the box lid mentions how the battery powered toy was supposed to move: "the float is mechanically engineered to move slowly in starting. it also turns direction upon bumping into another object - after a pause of several seconds."

the floats were most likely sold around 1970, but i have no idea how many were made...

last dance...

2011-04-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

only a few more days to see my exhibition "stone's throw" at susanne vielmetter LA projects. this coming saturday, the 23rd, is the last day of the show.
gallery hours are 11-6.

images, location, etc. susanne vielmetter LA projects: click here
artforum.com pick: click here

some seemingly incompatible loves...

2011-04-18T00:16:00.000-07:00

eastman johnson, woman reading, 1874

morgan russell, still life synchromy with nude in yellow, 1913

diego rivera, the hands of dr. moore, 1940

frantisek kupka, blue space, 1912

arthur dove, formation 1, 1943

arthur b davies, shy as a rabbit, 1900

milton avery, pool in the mountains,

last week i went down to san diego to give a talk related to my survey show, which is up at the sdsu art gallery. when i was just starting to make abstract paintings, circa 1984, i was pretty smitten with the work of howard hodgkin - particularly as his smaller works seemed humbler than a lot of the large scale painting going on at the time. the san diego art museum is currently exhibition a small show of paintings by hodgkin from the past 10 years, and since i'd totally lost interest in his work by 1986, i figured it might be worthwhile to drive to san diego a bit early, so i could spend some time with hodgkin's recent work... to see how relevant it might feel to me after stepping away from it for so many years.

while i will probably end up writing a post on hodgkin's work in the future, the best part of my day was wandering through the museum's permanent collection which i don't believe i'd seen in at least 10 years. as i wandered through the gallery, i ended up spending the most time with the 7 paintings pictured above... which left me wondering about their compatibility and their relationship not only to each other, but also in the type of images/objects i tend to respond to... especially since 3 are more or less abstract (2 non-objective), 3 are somewhat narrative (and relatively tightly rendered), and one - the milton avery - a landscape that hovers somewhere in between.

anyone who knows my work will not be surprised at the magnetic pull of the dove and the kupka. dove was the first abstract artist to really suggest to me the possibilities of making abstract paintings, and formation 1 is stellar - probably the best dove painting in southern california, and one of my favorites for how the shapes fit together and the feeling of motion. the first time i saw kupka's work in person was in lacma's seminal exhibition 'the spiritual in art: abstract painting' in 1986. the show changed my perception of what an abstract painting could be, and as an undergrad seeking alternatives to making artworks as academic discourse, kupka's cosmic interests seemed outsider-ish enough that they felt kind of rebellious (of course, it was sort of a quiet rebellion... like robert walser's writings or the recordings of moondog on a ny street corner).

i suppose if i am looking at degrees of abstraction, the next pair of images would be the russell and the avery. both have recognizable elements - something i tend to have less of an interest in - in relation to abstract painting; but russell's use of color reminded me of an off register comic book page, and the crude approach to color-as-science floored me. the painting reminded me of a pair of glasses i had as a kid that made all light look like rainbows. while clearly cubist-ically influenced, russell seems to be riffing off cezanne more than picasso, the color making still life quite woozy. russell's cosmic-ness is less grounded in kupka's spiritual quest, seeming more a product of conversing with goethe's color theories and the futurists sense of the culture of the machine and modernity, and from across the room russell's painting seems a mechanical mishap...

like most of avery's paintings, i am always floored by his ability to use flatness, soft fuzzy images, and his unbelievable use of color. everyone talks about matisse's use of color, yet folks rarely mention avery's. like matisse, avery was so great at integrating flat and dimensional images into a single composition... and both were able to make works with a feeling of lightness that never seems "thin." while the imagery in this landscape is not one of avery's most inventive, the sequence of yellow, blue, green, gray kills me. since i mentioned walser already, i might as well say that this landscape of avery's also reminds me of the kind of landscape some of walser's stories might take place... particularly the beginning of "the walk". like walser's shorter pieces, avery's paintings are deceptive... looking relatively simple on the outside, but feeling utterly complex once you are immersed.

the two most "realistic" paintings in terms of imagery, seem disconnected from the everyday - at least as i know it. 26 years separate eastman johnson's woman reading (1874) and arthur b. davies' shy as a rabbit (1900) - and the distance between the subjects and the rendering of the subjects in each painting are revealing. johnson's highly refined image of a woman reading a book with a sailboat in the background is no less stylized than davies' crude nude and rabbit - but between the two there is certainly a tension between the refined and the funky.

i've always been partial to the kind of quiet emotion of a painting like johnson's - he might not paint like vermeer or freidrich, but he does manage to capture an "inscape" through the picturing of an "outscape." i don't believe i've ever seen an american painting looking so dutch, and i think what i respond to more than anything else is the feeling of narrative (something i generally never look for in a painting), suggesting an atmosphere reflective of jacobsen's niels lhyne or the earlier romantic scenes of jack london's martin eden. perhaps it is the relationship of johnson's imagery to the mood of certain literature i respond to, rather than its relationship to painting that draws me towards it.

davies' painting is closer to a folk artist or a sunday painter. the woman is stiff, awkwardly pasted upon the surface. the rabbit looks flat and fake, and the landscape is as clumsy as it is beautiful. i think i responded so strongly to this painting because it was surrounded by works fueled by studied technique, and in such a context davies' painting stuck out like a sore thumb... and thus, it felt a bit more "real"... and a bit more as if it were wrought from necessity. it feels like a bedtime story, a folk song, a passion play.

the strangest painting in the museum is most certainly by diego rivera - a "portrait" called "the hands of dr. moore" from 1940. it's one of the more surrealist paintings i have seen by rivera. its tree on a small island can also be read as veins and tendons, feeling like a cruder salvador dali. this small painting floored me with its combined ability to attract and repel. images in paintings from the 1940's are rarely as difficult to look at or reconcile, but rivera's mix of humility, crudeness, pain, surgery, tending, trees, blood, cosmos, etc. is quite stunning from both across the room and just inches away. avery and davies' paintings seem strange because of their embrace of a kind of crudeness - seeming at first glances unrefined and awkward; but rivera's painting is unsettling in a totally different way. it is one of those things you don't really want to look at but can't help but stare at it in total fascination.

recent finds of stringed strangeness...

2011-04-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

three string related recent finds - all three photographs circa 1910, i know nothing about any of the subjects other than the weirdness that is visible in each of them.

it was 50 years ago today...

2011-04-12T00:09:00.000-07:00

on the 50th anniversary of gagarin's space flight, here are 2 different souvenir 7" records of gagarin's transmission from space... you can listen to the recording by clicking here.

when cats play banjos and squeeze boxes...

2011-04-10T09:43:00.000-07:00

photograph from england, circa 1900.

when horse names sounded like jazz tunes...

2011-04-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

moon rage
count cool
khal me later
miss ruby
stepping jewel
sickle jimmy
mercenary
rosma
our merhf
stealth
flying squirrel
little pidgie
spy fleet
bumblebee
stateless
gameylon
pert heels
sir gabe
four by five
marsh's turk
spee damion
patmon
arch miss
heelsaflyin
wind wings
peace rumor
alf a mo
heel flame
skippy toubo
priam's owl
don't dream
my urchin
stranglehold
blue trumpeter
smart apple
imbros
noble bell
breezing bebe
hug-me-tight
harass
royal's last
tiger jay
rustic lore
valentine boy
telegraph-hill
rush me

a sampling of horse names from a 1954 golden gate fields horse racing program...

more sound and landscape...

2011-04-01T01:02:00.000-07:00

... hardly any of his music came to him as music. everything started with a mood, an impression, something he's seen or heard which he then translated into music. driving out of florida, they'd heard an invisible bird call out, so perfect and beautiful you could have sworn you'd seen it silhouetted against the the sun streaking red across the horizon. as always, they didn't have time to stop, so duke made a note of the sound and used it later as the basis of "sunset and the mocking bird," "lightning bugs and frogs," came from the time they'd been heading out of cincinnati and had come across tall trees backlit by a ping-pong moon. lighting bugs flashed in the air and all around was the baritone croak of frogs... in demascus duke had woken up to an earthquake roar of cars, as if all the rush-hour traffic of the world had become snarled up in this one city; still not fully awake he'd found himself trying to orchestrate it. the light in bombay, the sky drifting over the arabian sea, a filth storm in ceylon - wherever he was, however tired, he'd not it down without pausing to consider its significance, confident he'd discover its musical potential later...
... he'd reached the point where virtually everything he encountered found its way into his music - a personal geography of the earth, an orchestral biography of the colors, sounds, smells, food and people - everything that he had felt, touched and seen... it was like being a word writer in sound - and what he was working on was a huge musical fiction that was always being added to and which was ultimately about itself...

from geoff dyer's "but beautiful (a book about jazz)" - here, a fictional account of duke ellington's writing process...

the man on the table...

2011-03-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

here are two recent finds (from different sources) a pair of RPPC photographs of lynne lewis white and his uke. while i was unable to find much information on him online, the two photos have extensive notes written in pencil on the back - (one also includes white's signature!).

from the backs, this is what i know:

these photos of lewis white are circa 1929, purchased originally at "the big show in vanadalia august 19-24, 1929". (i'm assuming white performed at the show).

white was born in kansas, and was 20 years old when one of these was purchased, and 21 years old when the other was purchased - meaning he was most likely 19 or 20 when the photos were taken.

based on the small #'s added onto the negative, these two images are from a series of at least 5.

white weighed 18 pounds and was 22 inches tall in both images, and he was known as the "midget troubadour" as well as "major white".

at the time of the photos he was living in bartlesville OK.

as much as i've stayed away from images that would fit comfortably withing the world of todd browning's freaks, something about the mood of these two photographs felt incredibly sublime. the atmosphere of white's poses with his instrument, standing on a table is so silently uncanny and yet even with the heavily professional look of the photograph, there is a matter of fact quality that gives it even more of an emotional punch. (not to mention thinking about the conversation between white and the photographer that led to white being photographed upon a table, rather than the floor).

i have no idea what white's music might have sounded like, nor the kinds of songs he regularly performed, but i sort of imagine him singing songs like nick lucas... a fellow troubadour... and you can hear a song of his here...

when stones are thrown...

2011-03-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

a preview of my show, stone's throw, opening tonight from 6-8

in the fall of 2008, a month or so after my grandmother died, i visited her sculpture studio and brought home several stones she had started to work on but never finished. these stones resonated with me because they were in process and unresolved - existing somewhere between nature and sculpture. i also found in her studio a small piece of paper on which she had written a quote by henry moore. while i tentatively approached the use of these stones in a series of drawings in early 2009, it wasn’t until the spring of 2010, during a residence at chinati, that i began to find ways to work in deeper conversation with the stones, returning for the first time in nearly 20 years to the idea of making work based on observing things in the manner of making a still life. of course, i was not interested in making a still life, but i wanted to allow the stones to challenge my process.

as i began these works, a number of reference points participated in the conversation: the hermetic and intimately personal nature of jasper john's post-70's paintings (as well as the similarity of his hatch marks to my grandmother’s chiseling), chinese scholar rocks, a small display of crystals and stones i pondered on a desk in goethe's house in weimar 8 years ago, christian wolff's score "stones" which i have carried in my wallet for years, some early films of dennis oppenhiem of his hands, gary beidler's film “hand held day”, jackson pollock’s awkward 1953 painting “portrait and a dream” - and most importantly the way certain analog activities and materials - hands, stones, paper, pencils, paint, celluloid film, drawing, wrapping, rubbing, etc. - seemed to relate more to a history of ritual, than to contemporary art (i'm talking about the inside, not the outside).

in the process of working on paintings, drawings, sculpture, film and sound, the stones were not only referenced for visual decisions, but were, at times, combined with self-devised scores based on the vowel structure or musical note structure (a-g) of my grandmother’s henry moore quote...

i’ve titled the show “stone’s throw” not only because of its reference to stones, but also because i like how the phrase is used to describe a short, yet inconsistent, distance from a source. the works in the exhibition exist in their finished forms a “stone’s throw” away from the stones that fueled their making... obviously, some remain a lot closer to their sources than others...

steve roden, march, 2011

when henry moore and my grandmother collided...

2011-03-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

some stills from the video installation: striations, which will be part of my show opening on thursday at susanne veilmetter la projects. it's the first time i have worked with a 16mm camera and the first time the bulk of the film is recognizable images. the film was inspired by a quote by henry moore that i found in my grandmother's sculpture studio - along with some of her unfinished stones. the pieces is silent, consisting of two projections of different lengths, placed side by side so that the "stereo" relationship is constantly shifting. there is also some hand drawn elements translating the moore quote into drawing actions for specified numbers of frames... the film gushingly gleans inspiration from dennis oppenheim's early films, gary beydler's hand held day, and an early film by jess that suggested a victorian magic lantern show. i'll eventually post a moving document...

two from the ultimate painter's painter...

2011-03-10T08:24:00.000-08:00

march 25, 1965
being fascinated by process, i have to acceed to and fight through all the processes involved in painting or drawing or whatever. in drawing the small pencil studies, for instance, i have a positive and very real - and lasting (it never flags) delight in overcoming the grain of the paper for my ends. this leads only too easily to some sort of "fix" on the process - and in times of confusion and weakness of purpose it can take over. but i cannot overcome this by simply saying to myself to myself that i must play down the process - overlook, for instance, areas where the paper is particularly recalcitrant, and go on to the "next" thing. once i've even become aware of something wrong - a weakness in the drawing where the process is not working wholly to my ends, that has to be changed, no matter how unnoticeable to anyone else, no matter what! not because hte drawing couldn't, possibly, be completed satisfactorily without doing it, but because i can't even see what else there is to be done until i have done it!

october 25, 1965
i believe that flatness (as of the canvas, for instance) is something we never see, but only know. the eyes are not constructed to see flatness, and we come nearer knowing it through the sense of touch. if this is true, the basis of our apprehension of a painting has a duality of see-touch, or maybe better - touch-see, which sets up what is probably the primary, vivifying tension on the basis of which the "living" - the "created" quality of a painting depends.

if this is so, is this why i must pay such endless and infinite attention to the topography of the paint on my canvas?

from the journals of myron stout

help support WFMU radio...

2011-03-09T07:14:00.001-08:00

i was recently invited to contribute to a fundraising project for radio WFMU in ny. daniel blumin, who hosts a great program on saturday nights from 9-midnight, invited a number of experimental music makers to record a cover song to help raise money for the radio station...

the result is an extremely limited cd called "your song, my foot - an earrational selection of covers". that will only be available during the fundraiser...

most folks who know my work will be quite surprised with my cover song choice, but more so, i think anyone knows my work will be floored by the unexpected nature of the results...

here's the track listing (which is stellar):

Jowe Head "Lady Eleanor" (Alan Hull)
Michael Gendreau "What We Do Is Secret" (Germs)
él-g "C'est la Ouate" (Caroline Loeb, Pierre Grillet)
Double Nelson "Der Mussolini" (Gabi Delgado-Lopez, Robert Görl
If, Bwana "Directly From My Heart To You" (Little Richard)
Black to Comm "Tropique, 1985" (Axel de Kirianov)
DooDooettes "Come Out" (Steve Reich)
Astral Social Club "Sky" (The Dead C)
Giuseppe Ielasi "Beautiful Child" (Stevie Nicks)
Helen Rush/PG 6 "Take It As It Comes" (The Doors)
Squomb / Chromaa "Up, Up and Away" (Jimmy Webb)
Volcano The Bear "Vienna" (B.Currie/C.Cross/W.Cann/M.Ure)
Steve Roden "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (Bauhaus)
Simon Joyner "After the Gold Rush" (Neil Young)
Felix Kubin "Bandits One Five" (Nikki Sudden)
Ashtray Navigations "Ride A White Swan" (Marc Bolan)
The Rebel "The Savingest Man on Earth" (Uncle Eck Dunford)

all of the artists involved have 100% donated their songs to the project to support the station...

i believe that the disc is only going to be available as a premium during the pledge drive, and can be obtained for a $75 donation.

to support WFMU and specifically daniel's program, it would be ideal to pledge during his show - this coming saturday night from 9pm - midnight NY time - but you can support the station, and purchase the disc anytime between now and then.

donations can be made via the phone at 1-800-989-368 or via the web here

WFMU is a magnificent radio station that truly supports experimental and new music.

agamwords...

2011-03-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

Between 1959-1962, Agam also experimented in the application of multiplicity to a particular kind of theater equipped with several stages upon which different scenes of the same play took place simultaneously.

In 1958, Agam even began experimenting with a new kind of "simultaneous writing," which dissociates speech from reading, and in which several verbal expressions are written one above the other so that they may be grasped at the same time. He demonstrated some of these ideas in a didactic illustrated book in Hebrew, published in Israel in 1989: Agmilim ("Agamwords").

i would be very interested in hearing from anyone out there who knows more about agam's agmilim...

go west young pallet...

2011-03-02T19:44:00.000-08:00

yesterday, while stopped at a red light in alhambra, i couldn't help but notice this scene from my car window. this somewhat incongruous image of a pallet leaning up against a tree, seemed as if the pallet - obviously a former tree itself - had returned to its mother tree... resting under her branches with the comfort of a return to the womb...

after its long bitter journey of trying to make it in the big city (with a forklift continually stuck into its bottom), the little pallet certainly seems exhausted and at peace in its return to its source. i think there's something tender about it... and as i drove away, i imagine the little pallet just sat there resting, taking in the comfort and shade of its own origins...

when a piece of victorian scrap suddenly feels connected...

2011-02-28T08:34:00.000-08:00

recently picked up this small victorian trade card for the mason and hamlin organ company. and while it did catch my eye in regards to its relation to my collection of early music related photographs, i suddenly found myself realizing that much of the design seems totally compatible with my own aesthetic sense.

for over 20 years i have found inspiration in modernist graphic design/architecture and abstract painting, but slowly i have been discovering that my own aesthetic is messier, more awkward, and less inclined towards empty space (i.e. i love the "clean" stuff, but it just doesn't seem to want to come out of me as a maker). what struck me about this image is how the hanging banner on the left totally disrupts the symmetry. the amount of ornament, repetition, and general visual noise also seems consistent with my own work, as well as with the repetitions of tramp art and so-called outsider art. on many levels, i can look at the way this image was constructed and can see certain visual decisions that feel familiar.

this painting from 2008 "the same sun spinning and fading..." certainly seems aesthetically compatible with the old paper object i found a few weeks ago:

what is interesting to me is that this relationship suggests an evolving aesthetic rather than a dedicated card carrying member of single aesthetic or historical club. as much as i still gush over the norton simon's maholy-nagy painting every time i see it, i have also begun to feel a strong connection to some of the victorian era's awkward and complex way of visual composition (and how much of its awkwardness is an artifact of an analog and/or mechanical process - rather than a digital/virtual one).

it isn't so much that i am looking for inspiration in such things, as much as discovering that i feel some sort of sympathetic relationship to certain objects and eras that never seemed to be an influence or interest.

rather than working from the printed object above, i'm more interested in the potential of having deeper conversations with things that are able to unexpectedly reveal things to me about my work that has previously been unnoticed or unacknowledged... once again proving that these old things can not only inspire work, at times, but can also expand the conversation.

4 free events... starting tonight...

2011-02-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

tonight, feb 23, at 7 pm i will be participating in an event at sci arc called "polytopes: the architecture of soundscapes" which will feature talks and performances, participants include: Juan Azulay, Jean Michel Crettaz, Craig Hodgetts, Lance Putnam, Curtis Roads, Steve Roden, David Rosenboom and Carolina Trigo. i will be performing a 20 minute improvised work using video field recordings taken on site, as well as scores created from the site... FREE...info here.

friday afternoon, feb 25, i will be giving an artist talk with john o'brien at cerritos college from noon - 2pm. location info here.

friday night, feb 25, my 20 year survey show that was recently at the armory center for the arts - steve roden in between, curated by howard fox, will travel to the san diego state university art gallery. there will be an opening reception from 6-9pm, and a conversation with the artist and curator from 6-7pm. more info here.

and finally, at 8 pm on saturday night february 26, i will have the honor of performing with david grubbs and david watson as part of ad hoc #2 at beacon arts. more info here.

when plucking words from the likes of bud fischer...

2011-02-22T02:03:00.000-08:00

he thinks i
can only.

his eyes,
this
last snapshot
an action:
click and out.

gophers and posies
we find on the side,
hoping and praying
for chance.

gone line blown only bags full.

bird box swish - thr-heee always.

this car,
that basket:
for fire
wood
fire
wood.
chop
up.
for fire
wood
fire
wood.

boom. soft:
know it solid.

just a bump -
your head against the ceiling
my head against the ceiling.
exalted,
exalted after hand and foot.
exalted...spoken.

peculiar thing bangs into your looking,
i heard,"firm firm."

i'm glad
i feel
i got my chest.
i heard in the world of the night
sunshine, the door.

fire
wood:
da-da-da-da-da-da-dah.

rough
in the floor
so much:
la-la-la-la-la-laah!

i don't want.
i want -
i'll do that pleasure.

"ooky... ooky" to himself...
what's wrong? stop crying.

i have hunch enough,
now surely i'll be surprised.

in. this. i've you. and now wise
to. to sever connections that will be
lovely -
squawking or still.

(from found cut up fragments of comic strip panels from a 1927 sunday comic section.)

two field recording fragments from rilke...

2011-02-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

lofty god of distant harmonies
i sense you everywhere deep in every
thing
upon the gently patterned slope the
trees
stand silent as when they first heard
you sing
---
.......... of the brown

.......... of the sonorous
dried-up earth of the forest
drums the flight of the faun
---

two fragments (i am assuming left unused) from rilke's duino elegies........

two schwitters and a gaze...

2011-02-14T06:50:00.000-08:00

she is my fairy queen:
she
is my fairy queen.
her shoe
is my fairy shoe,
when i walk on her feet,
its heaven for me.
i wish from my fairy
heaven with her.
round and open
open through the water.
open in the air.
open and round,
round and open.
round on the corner.
who
understands
you?
and
during the night,
when darkness is open in the air,
all things are round
on all corners.

small chinese poem:
I stood before my iron front door.
my friend drove by on a dirigible bicycle.
then my thoughts remembered her.

(two poems by kurt schwitters, photo: anonymous RPPC circa 1900)

when awkwardness arrives through drawing...

2011-02-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

"drawing is immediate, requires little technological assistance. just making a mark. some primitive intention here. pre-linguistic maybe. but the drawing mark lies close to the linguistic sign. and drawing is a kind of sign making to be sure. but what kind of sign is the question that arises with every drawing mark that is always more than just a mark. and for me language is often also there, written on the page beside the non-linguistic marks. two different but inseparable kinds of marks/signs. only linguistic beings seem to make drawing marks (the apes that now make them are induced to do so by humans). getting out the sheet of paper and the stuff to make the marks means opening up a space that is both mental and physical. maybe in this space i get as close as i can to erasing, for a brief time, the mind/body problem, which is really not so much of a "problem" as a kind of awkwardness that arrives in the form of linguistic confusion."

text: robert morris, interview from "from mnemosyne to clio: the miror to the labyrinth"
images: robert morris, blind time drawings (some of my most favorite drawings in the world)

as if antonin artaud ever played the banjo...

2011-02-03T09:40:00.000-08:00

" I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.
I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point
—and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality
(from the confrontation of forces of powerful size),
and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold—
in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled
—are lost in the shadows of man."

(image: anonymous snapshot, 1930's, text: antonin artaud, fragment from "the nerve meter")

when gordon house was like and unlike sol lewitt...

2011-01-31T00:13:00.000-08:00

like sol lewitt, the print editions made by uk artist gordon house in the 60's and 70's were rooted in permutations. unlike sol lewitt, house's day job included graphic design work - thus many of his serial motifs seem more related to the late 60's and early 70's graphic approach to art deco and decorative design than serial minimalism.

i hadn't come across house's work until i was doing a bit of research on the work of richard smith, whom i posted about in relation to his kite paintings that hang from the ceiling of the mr. chow restaurant in beverly hills. smith's paintings were exhibited in london before they were shipped to the restaurant, and the exhibition's announcement card was designed by house (and thusly, i'm assuming they were part of the same london "scene".

house is certainly not a household (sorry) name here in the states, but the carnegie and the brooklyn museum mounted a 20 year survey of his printwork in 1981. the catalog is a strange affair, with tiny images of over 130 different works in black and white - and only 4 images in color. i'm sure it was a cost decision, but it seems odd considering how important color is to house's work.

his prints are an array of tightly organized forms, shapes, and sizes - yet there is a clear consistency in all of his projects: a crisp graphic visual language and an extremely extroverted love of geometric design. at the beginning of each series in the catalog, house has written a short text which tends to be a kind of diagrammatic explanation of process rather than a conceptual one. i love house's down to earth approach, writing of his inspirations and process in a relatively matter of fact way, simply laying the process bare.

house's short statements are are also peppered with a variety of source references and inspirations that clearly do collide in his visual motifs such as: the graphic work of edward munch, owen jones' "grammar of ornament", mcintosh, edo period japan, record album covers, french posters (lautrec/steinlen), hokusai, old type catalogs, bridge arches, volkswagons, moser and klimt, gothic leaded windows, the book of kells... and i would add that house's work was certainly rooted in pop art as well.

i recently managed to pick up two preliminary drawings by house (pictured above). the drawings were made to map out a couple of works from a series of silkscreen prints he worked on in 1972-73. of course what is interesting about these drawings is that you can see house thinking through the process, not only through form, but also via color through the hand painted "paint chips" attached at the bottoms. both of the drawings relate to series of vertical "tri-part" prints, with various permutations in 3 equal sections - each containing an arc, a stripe, or a triangle. the prints themselves are pretty stunning, but i really love the way these notations speak about house's process... and the sort of deconstructed images that have been taken apart in the drawings are pretty darn wonderful.

a sad day for small music...

2011-01-22T07:24:00.000-08:00

"when i went to a garden in okayama, a crane landed and suddenly gave a loud cry. i was surprised that a sound like that could exist. and then the silence afterwards: in complete harmony in the space. then i understood the beauty of japanese gardens."
rolf julius, 1992

life and death are certainly strange things. last weekend i picked up a copy of a recent cd release of rolf julius' music for the ears and small music no. 1 - both ecordings from 1979. on monday, i spent the entire day in the studio painting, with the cd repeating for about 10 hours. every time i took a break from painting, i sat and listened to these stunningly beautiful and simple works in their entirety, and i realized how much his work has always inspired me.

when i first started to make "sound art" i wanted to be rolf julius. the first time i met him, for a small festival in berlin, i ran into him in a hallway, where it had looked a bit like he had dropped a small suitcase on the floor and all of his gear had fallen out of it in disarray. he was standing there bent over looking at the small speakers, wires, and small cassette players as if reading a map. after standing next to him for a few minutes, i realized that sound was also present, barely audible, and that this was his installation. it was a wonderful first meeting, like being kids and looking for small colorful insect in the grass.

his work always had this natural feeling of happenstance on the surface, and then it started to work its immersive magic on you. it was the least pretentious work i've ever encountered - certainly more "lower case" in terms of its presence than i could ever achieve; and as an artist and human being this humility was also always present. he was incredibly generous to me, not only over the years that we exhibited together, but most importantly when i was just beginning, and he simply treated me like an another artist.

monday, immersed in these two early pieces of his, i spent a lot of time sitting and listening. at one point i went over to my desk and started to write him a letter, as i realized how long i had been listening to his work in its various forms, marveling at his drawings, his writings, and just how hugely inspirational his work has been to me - not only since the beginning of my making sound works, but continually, still, now. i wanted to tell him that his work was like a beacon to me - like the painters myron stout, alfred jenson, arthur dove, lee mullican, who always kick my ass and push me forward, julius' work is always there as a kind of measuring stick, something to live up to. unfortunately i never finished the letter.

these early works of his contain the core of everything he would do from that point forward, and i wanted to thank him for the continued tactile nature of his sound, its fragility, its presence and absence, its repetition and abstraction, but mostly its minimal presence and some undefinable quality of the organic and natural, as well as how composition too can be humble. so many times rolf called his work "small music" and it wasn't bullshit artspeak... he really meant it...

so, this morning when i received some emails of rolf's passing, my mind went to those little pieces i remember first hearing at e/static, small tea cups with little lids and tiny speakers inside - so one could sit with the object, and with the lid off the sound barely audible but constant, and then to place the lid on the cup to silence the sound. its a very sad day for sound art, and it is a very sad day for ears.

i hope anyone who is unfamiliar with rolf's work will use this sad day to discover his quietly magical world, and for those of us who were lucky enough to know him, i know we will all continue to be inspired by the works he has left behind. his sound works will continue to grow ever more present, while his physical presence will certainly be missed.

i love the sound of trains, especially when they are distant, and i can't see them...

2011-01-19T07:09:00.000-08:00

(2 snapshots from 1930, a boy and a homemade radio)

when shaw demanded a new alphabet...

2011-01-13T04:56:00.000-08:00

i recently came across a book i cannot believe i'd never seen before. it is a penguin paperback edition of bernard shaw's androcles and the lion printed in two languages. on the left side is the english text, but what totally floored me is text on the left, which has been translated into the "shaw alphabet"... and the alphabet's story is quite amazing...

when shaw died, his will contained provisions to appoint a public trustee towards the development of a new "proposed british alphabet", made up of 40 letters, to enable the "said language to be written without indicating single sounds by groups of letters or diacritical marks".

he also specified that a phonetic expert would "transliterate my play androcles and the lion into the proposed british alphabet assuming the pronunciation to resemble that recorded of his majesty king george V, and sometimes described as northern english..."

in 1957, the public trustee announced an award of 500 pounds for the design of such an alphabet, and 450 different designs were eventually submitted in 1958. no single proposal seemed to fit the bill, so the money was split between the top 4 designs, "thus closing the competition." the public trustee then asked "an expert in this field" to work with the designers to create an alphabet closest to shaw's will's graphic phonetical vision. it seems the final design was a group effort, leading to an alphabet that looks a bit like greek or russian characters..

also in the book's introduction:

"here is shaw's alphabet. it has been proved that those who wish to read it can do so after only a few hours of concentrated deciphering... you will notice from the comparisons that shaw's alphabet is more legible and one-third more economical in space than traditional printing... open the book and hold it upside down in front of a mirror. both mirrored pages will thus become equally unfamiliar. keep the back of the book pressed against your lips, and advance towards the mirror until you are able to see individual characters clearly enough to be able to copy them. note that the shaw characters are clearly seen at a greater distance..."

of course, there have been many attempts to re-invent the alphabet, but i don't know of any other situation where a very very famous writer funded a newly written alphabet that was actually used in a publication by a mainstream publisher. at the time the penguin book was published, shaw alphabet editions of androcles and the lion were also offered free to libraries.

online, the alphabet is called both the "shaw alphabet" and the "shavian alphabet" and there are numerous interesting histories, and variations of the typeface online, including some places you can download a program to convert the letters you are looking at right now, into their shavian equivalents. personally, i prefer this musty old penguin with its detachable reading and writing key... which seems somewhat easily found through the usual used book channels...

guest post at lacma's unframed blog...

2011-01-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

i was honored to be invited to do a guest post on the recent blinky palermo exhibition for LACMA's unframed blog. i have been a huge fan of palermo's work for years, particularly the early works, and my difficulty with trying not to suck the life out the work with words led me a bit towards the ridiculous... this is what happens when one tries to write about work which should not be read about, as much as simply stood in front of.

to read the post click here.

closing reception on sunday...

2011-01-04T22:24:00.000-08:00

sunday is the last day of my 20 year survey at the armory center for the arts in pasadena, and the super wonderful folks at the armory have decided to have a closing reception from 11 am - 1 pm in the gallery. i will be there (although not wearing the hat pictured above), and so will the curator, howard fox. details here.

also, we just confirmed that the exhibition will be traveling to the university art gallery at san diego state university. tentative dates are february 14 - may, with several public events... i'll post more about this when the details are ironed out.

on new years day, with sensory lines and memory lines...

2011-01-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

"we choose our favorite [insects] according to the way they look, and according to the mood they offer. a glow-worm in the grass on a late summer evening can - as a mildly, magically shining lantern greeting us from a tuft - in a paradoxical way, provide a mood for an entire twilight landscape. through our senses the glow-worm gives us a wide range for our soul. in a similar way, a ladybug concentrates, in its jewelry-like daintiness, the mood of a sunny summer meadow in the highlight of beauty which she herself re-creates with her wing cases. there is something indescribable in such a concentrated experience. the ladybug can represent all the senses' summers, with sensory lines and memory lines coming together in an intense now, all in one spot. such a distinctively emphasized experience of one spot, of one now and one life, can only be conveyed by insects, because they are small enough to make us focus our vision on that particular point: the up-close point in the living now. at the same time we find there is a different system of coordinates here than the one that deals with positions - a coordinate system of the senses, of experience and poetry."

harry martinson, insects - an adventure of the mind, from views from a tuft of grass

on new years eve...

2010-12-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

two real photo postcards taken by photographer charles howell, the "official photographer of pleasure beach, blackpool". the top one was taken in 1933, and was purchased from a guy in london two years ago. the second was taken in 1937, and purchased from a guy in india last week. since neither were ever postmarked, i am assuming at least one gent in each photo carried their respective photos home themselves... i'm also pretty sure the photo that eventually lived in india had a much longer journey...

as we move from one year into the next, we can be assured that life continues to move, although there will certainly be constants...

sure,
the hats might go from white to black
the banjos might get larger rims
and the suits might suit the day,
with a bit more black than gray.

but in the end, all 8 knees will continue to be bent
and the largest bottle of beer in the world
will always be between you and a friend -
even if its neck eventually gets straightened out
or its pedestal is transformed from a barrel to a bench.

yes, life will shift with the absence of three "little ones,"
but you can always change your landscape
from lush grotto to tree and distant mountains...

wishing you all a happy last day of this year, and a wonderful first day of next year... this year has certainly held for me at least a few days feeling somewhat like a place called pleasure beach, and i hope you all find your own way there in the year to come...

when a film and a concert elicit verbosity and a ramble...

2010-12-29T22:19:00.000-08:00

several weeks ago i watched louis malle's 1974 film humain, trop humain... and a night later i went to see vicky ray and the eclipse quartet perform morton feldman's 1985 piece "piano and string quartet". i'd never seen malle's film before, and while i've listened to feldman's piece many times on CD (i once spent a month listening to it every night before sleep, and it might be my favorite piece of his music), i'd never had the opportunity to hear it live.

coincidence can be a strange thing. the film arrived a few days before the concert, and i watched the film without any real thoughts towards feldman's work until the following evening, when his origami-like music began folding and unfolding in on itself in front of my ears, and i couldn't stop thinking about the film... and the experience led to this lengthy ramble...

in simple terms the film and music (live) crossed paths in various places:

pacing (they both move slowly)

patience (in the works' trajectory, and the necessity of it by an audience)

precision (in movement and sound)

repetition (of seemingly mundane actions that become transcendent)

space, and or, breath (pauses or shifts, but never drama)

actual presence (as opposed to metaphor... i.e. you see what you see and you hear what you hear)

spectral particles (bigger things made of vibrating smaller things)

humans and objects in sympathy (be it an instrument or a machine)

duration (both are about the same length of time - depending on who is playing the feldman)

lilting (as in lilting moments amongst the tension)

tension (as in tension found between the lilts)

harmony (as well as dissonance)

abstraction (as an opposite to narrative)

implied space (through repetition and/or permutation)

actual sound (or image) generating ethereal space

hands (moving, lifting, rubbing, touching, working, playing)

drone (the resonance of a piano pedal, the resonance of machines)

choreography (as in the physical activities of the musicians and the factory workers)

and certainly finding more things to bind these works together would be as endless as listing their differences....

humain, trop humain, was filmed mostly in a citroen factory, and consists of various shots of folks working in tandem with machines. one of the most beautiful images is of a woman on some kind of vertical elevator, dangling a large roll of steel while moving across what seems to be an endless space of similar rolls arranged in patterns on the ground. the pace of the movement is slow, focused, and filled with a tension (not a danger tension, but a tension tension...) as if the situation is so fragile it might fall apart - perhaps a better term would be architectural tension, which is very much like certain moments of feldman's music. both pieces are also both rigorous and gentle at the same time, suggesting a space of patience and surrender, rather than endurance (and this idea could be applied in both cases to the performers as well as the audience).

like feldman's piece, malle's film has no true narrative - nor does it have any kind of spoken descriptions. the visual situation, as well as its accompanying sound, is the viewer's only known reality, and with feldman, the situation is similar: you don't go forward as much as you simply immerse. both works are about being "in the moment" as opposed to a necessity of looking forward or back for "meaning". while both works seem abstract, they are, in truth, much more actual, allowing the viewer/listener to move within the space (formal, emotional or otherwise) of what they are seeing and hearing - and if one is sensitive to such an experience, both works have the potential to elicit a transcendent response.

while malle's film is listed in most in reviews as a documentary, it is actually much closer to a field recording. neither the machines nor the workers are performing for the cameras, as much as their movement and sound are artifacts of situational activities. malle is not directing the movement nor the sound as much as he is documenting it. nonetheless, the editing, the point of view and the treatment of material in sound and vision ends up closer to poetry. in feldman's case, where sound is perceived as the primary audience experience, the visual choreography of the performers' synchronicity is also hard to ignore - and while it too is simply an artifact of music making activities, it is a visually beautiful thing to behold.

somehow, while watching both of these groups of humans move in certain rhythms related to the tasks at hand, i thought of cage's words about not wanting to replicate nature but being interested in working within nature's manner of operation. if anyone was able to write music that replicated the delicately finite workings of nature in a way that also reflects its abstraction, fragility, precision, permutation, repetition, implied randomness and slippery organization (slippery as in 'hard to grasp', rather than loose and free), it would be feldman. watching malle's film, one also gets the sense that even with the mechanical repetition of the machines, the human element gives these actions a different kind of quality - as if the two, man and machine, are coming together through negotiation, lending certain qualities of themselves to each other.

while most people would not consider malle's film in relation to the term "visual music", i do think that viewing it comes closer to that kind of experience than anything else, and i think the use of the words 'visual' and 'music' pressed together make sense in terms of how the film speaks (as opposed to the historical use of the term). although this idea was probably far from malle's concerns, i couldn't help but think about the film's repetitions - not only in obvious relation to a kind of dehumanized mechanical worker existence; but also how the mantra-like visual rhythms suggest the kind of integration of parts found in steve reich's early pieces, and perhaps even the repetitive nature of chant and prayer.

in terms of a different reading, vincent canby wrote about the film in relation to humor, irony and criticality - singling out a scene where a car-body is slowly submerged into a vat of soapy water which he suggests is a tongue in cheek reference to the film psycho. i'm thinking that canby and i have different eyes, because i lean a lot more towards transcendence and poetry than an ironic poke at car culture and the plight of factory workers. humain, trop humain is a complex film to experience, and canby's take seems too one dimensional a response. certainly the repetition of the actions of humans working in a factory is the focal point of malle's conversation; but it would be difficult to deny the work's complexity, as well as well as its potential for multiple readings, to suggest is is only about "plight".

the funny thing for me, is that the car-scene canby saw as a joke, i saw as one of the most beautiful sequences in the entire film. the slow moving image of the sinking vehicle seems much like a deep breath or pause, resembling an elephant slowly moving into a pond, to bathe with a sense of submerging and floating. to me, the scene felt more akin to the musicality of a requiem...

while many people have written about the film's lack of narration, i have yet to find a review that talks about the importance of malle's use of existing sound. his use of the factory's "natural" soundscape tends to, again, not only suggest a dehumanized work environment, but how the repetition of noise can also become lilting, musical, emotional, and at times, even beautiful. there are many moments in the film, where the sound takes over, and i was drawn away from the visual repetition, focusing suddenly more on the "film" that was coming out of the speakers than pictured on the screen.

after spending an evening with malle's factory workers, i found myself immersed in feldman's piano and string quartet, watching the musicians perform their necessary soundings, shifts and pauses. they were insanely precise. they seemed complex machines, but there was not a single second of the music that felt clinical or mechanical.

as the musicians were locked into something i would absurdly call feldman's "groove", they created not only a whole lot of delicate beauty, but a whole lot of tension as well. feldman's piece is spacious, pause-filled, and for the most part, relatively quiet; so one is not only aware of the music, but also of the sounds of one's own body and the sounds of the space. watching and listening to the musicians, it seemed that if anyone in the theatre misplaced a breath, feldman's fragile structure would cave in upon itself. this tension could also be found in certain latter sequences of malle's film, where the scenes became more about hands than spans, and the workers' activities became more intimately connected to their respective machines, where a break in one's focus might cost a finger or a hand. in both cases, the building process is always moving towards the potential precipice of collapse (although i'm not comparing the reality of a wrong note to a lost appendage...).

while the factory repetitions are truly repetitive (at least for the most part, as machines do have their own idiosyncracies), feldman's repetitions seem, at least to someone who doesn't read music, much more implied - feeling more like permutations than actual repeated sequences. while the repetition of the machines becomes more complex as they blend together into drone, feldman's implied repetitions are like watching really small waves... they all look the same at first, but over time you realize that no two are truly alike.. with feldman, everything suddenly becomes about perception and intricacies.

one of feldman's quotes in the program's notes also seemed to relate to malle's film:

"up to one hour you think about form.
after an hour and a half it's scale."

i know he was talking about his own music, but this idea would certainly be appropriate towards describing humain, trop humain as well; and in the end, as both pieces move from the building of single forms towards a scale, one is absorbed into either form's greater continuum.

december 26, 1960

2010-12-26T22:28:00.000-08:00

50 years ago today...

"we tried a new method of editing. we have cards for every shot. we layed them out on a huge reflector. we caught a roach and let it crawl through the cards. but somehow, the beast chose a very straight line, not interesting at all"

jonas mekas, december 26, 1960, from the diaries, in "the american new wave", walker art center, 1982, image circa 1964

stars and tree...

2010-12-24T08:18:00.000-08:00

stars
float from the borders of the main.
-
above
the vast of heaven strung with brilliant stars.
-
how looks the night? there does not miss a star.
the million sorts of unaccounted motes
now quicken, sheathed in the yellow galaxy.
there is no parting or bare interstice
where the sting of compass of a skylark's wings
would not put out some tiny golden centre.
-
stars waving their indivisible rays.
sky fleeced with the milky way.
-
night's lantern
pointed with pierced lights, and breaks of rays
discover'd everywhere.
-
the sky minted into golden sequins.
stars like gold tufts.
- - golden bees.
- - golden rowels.
sky peak'd with tiny flames.
-
stars like tiny spoked wheels of fire.
lanterns of night, pierced in eyelets.
-
his gilded rowels
now stars of blood.
-
a star most spiritual, principal, preeminent
of all the golden press.
-
or ever the early stirrings of skylark
might cover the neighbor downs with a span of singing,
while phospher, risen upon the shallowing dark,
in the ruddied country of the day's up-bringing
stood capital, eminent, ... gonfalon-bearer
to all the starry press, -

gerard manly hopkins, star images: september to december 1864 (from poems for the millennium volume 3), image: cyanotype, 1870's