when ink blots are sad...

sad news today, artist bruce conner passed away in san francisco on monday. for me, he was the artist who most signified forging your own path without compromise.

i remember being bored to tears at the 97 whitney biennial until i wandered into a room of conner's drawings, which seemed not only relevant, but stunningly beautiful and comforting in the midst of a show that gave me much eye-sickness. at the time, he was in his 60's.

i have thought of that moment often, in relation to my own career, as well when i work with grad students, because even though conner probably felt slighted and underappreciated up to that point, you can't discount the difference in being in a show like that at 28 or 60 - both what it means to the artist, as well as the quality of the work shown. even more so, it suggested that what would now be considered a slower career path has a purpose - to be able to work in solitude, to forge your own path outside of market or social concerns, and to find your own voice. plus... conner's room in the 97 whitney really kicked some serious ass, and almost every other artist i talked to about the show mentioned his work before anything else.

in its own quiet way, conner's work was cantankerous, but never at the expense of being incredibly poetic and moving. i remember walking through his 'retrospective' and thinking so much of the work and its installation seemed to be flipping someone or something the bird. the tactile qualities and solitary labor in his work were incredibly refreshing at a time when french theory surrounding the simulacrum was being shoveled down my throat in grad school. while i always felt conner's work approached elegance, it also seemed to come out of the simple spoken truth: 'shit or get off the pot'. you got the sense from it that he simply sat down and went to work with a purpose.

it came as no surprise to me to discover that he photographed much of the early san francisco punk scene, because his work has that spirit that punk rock created in a lot of people who participated in its early days - when it was creative and open, before it became codified and angry (and pretty darn boring...). even in the ink blots, which are incredibly elegant, connor seems to kind of dare you to question their sincerity and labor, because on one level they are intricate controlled drawings, but on another they are simply drops of ink on folded paper. if you buy into them, you partially buy into a kind of alchemy, and thus a level of belief (one rarely speaks of punk rock in terms of belief, but for those of us who were there in the early days, it actually held much hope and creative presence - and perhaps that is why so many people involved ended up as artists...) it's interesting to think about conner's works in relation to a punk rock spirit, because they don't wear what would typically be described as a punk aesthetic on their outsides as much as they are imbued with a kind of independent spirit on the inside (an independent spirit is both personal and highly evolved... in relation to conner, how can one not think of jess, or cornell...). i think this feeling pervades all of his work.

the ink blot drawings and earlier psychedelic felt tip pen drawings (hyper obsessive versions of every high school stoner's notebook doodles) clicked with a kind of psychedelia that was uniquely san franciscan. it is interesting to see how much of a rebel conner seems next to someone like terry riley, with whom he collaborated a few times. where riley, can dive whole hog into some seriously new age territory, conner never seemed to lose that rebellious edge; and it is this that gives his work so much weight for me. he's never willing to simply hand you sugar, because he wants you to have to work a little, to come to his work on his terms.

i've always felt that conner's work questions the idea of pure beauty, as much as it embraces it; and it contains not only the fluffiness of the spirit, but accepts and willingly inserts, the darker aspects of the spirit in heaping tablespoon doses. the ink blot drawings are the culmination of this for me. it takes a while to wander through them, and to discover both their beauty, and their darkness. they also seem to slyly question the idea that meaning in work is completely embedded and controlled by the artist, in that each one is populated by hundreds of tiny rorschach blots... the thing that more than anything else, is the most recognizable cultural symbol of a viewer creating meaning through his own inner desires... artwork as a trigger of self knowledge. by the time you arrive at the end of your their journey into one of these complex visual worlds, you will have seen, or found, more about yourself, and the artist, than you probably bargained for.

the image above is one of my prized possessions, a tiny (and i mean TINY) drawing, probably from the early 1980's.

before joseph cornell...

i had planned to do a week on the hans christian andersen museum, but i think i'll just give you one long post with a bit of everything. i went to the museum initially to see andersen's paper cut outs. i had seen images of these in a little exhibition booklet a friend showed me, and the reproductions were so poor, that i became obsessed with seeing them in person. i didn't really know much about andersen beyond the ugly duckling emperor's new clothes fairytales that everyone seems to know but most of the folks i know have never really read (myself included).

to begin the journey, instead of reading the fairy tales i decided to read his travel writings, simply because they were published by one of my favorite publishers - green integer. it was quite illuminating to read andersen's travel writings while traveling myself, and the book also gives one a real sense of andersen's personality. the best parts of the book - hearing him describe his first moments on a train or the first time hearing jenny lind sing - are wonderful; but to be honest, andersen doesn't really seem like someone i'd want to hang out with. i didn't notate it all, but he probably complains about something at least once a page, and he comes across as an extremely petty human. he was clearly insecure and a hypochondriac, unbelievably vain, completely self involved, and had a tendency towards being an incredible snob. he was obsessed with his appearances in newspapers, and he was definitely the center of his universe.

at first i was disappointed also in the fact that he seemingly hardly writes at all about things that might illuminate his works or process, until you realize that everything in his fairy tales is simply a re-telling of his own life's story. the fictional narratives come from his own obsession with small moments of engagement. a harsh word from a friend or critic would send him into fits, and it seems a lot of the fairy tales were ways of dealing with that hurt, anger, etc. the stories are ways of reconstructing a situation so it could resolve the way he needed it to - full of happiness, sadness, revenge, reward, etc. it's clear that he felt he was treated as an ugly duckling, even after he became famous. it's also clear that he viewed himself as a beautiful swan that the world should fawn over.

the cut outs fascinated me, because of their visual sophistication; as well as their technical combination of awkwardness and finesse. andersen writes about making these things while he was usually at parties or dinner tables and telling some of his stories. he was self conscious and nervous about these situations (feeling his poor background made him stand out in high society social gatherings); so while he told stories, he would also be cutting. it enabled him to focus more on the paper than on the people watching and listening. of course, there was also theatre involved... he finished the story and then unfolded the paper as a kind of "ta da!" moment. for me, these fragile maps of hand movements and quick thinking did not disappoint, and they hold quite a lot of visual magic. their tendency towards a kind of dark victorian surrealism and even sometimes abstraction are marvellous.

what i was unprepared for were the other aspects of andersen's art and craft makings. he made travel drawings, relatively crude, that were always sized to fit in his vest or jacket pocket. these were sketched in pencil at sights/destinations during the day (like field recordings), and inked later, in a hotel room or such. what is interesting about them is this idea that the pencil drawing is done while looking at a place, attempting to replicate a visual experience; while the ink is done from notation and memory, creating a new visual experience. you can see the differences between the two different "making moments" in each drawing. between the pencil and ink lines there is a lot of messy disconnect between vision and memory. andersen struggles to remember what a wispy pencil line might have been notating; and the awkwardness of the resulting ink line gives the drawings an outsider quality. on one hand they feel generic, on another they have the kind of crude sincerity. when they are more fragmented, they can also resemble some of beuys early drawings.

the above image an inkblot turned into a little person was the only one he seems to have done like this, but it is interesting to note that he met victor hugo, who did a ton of incredible drawings from stains and ink blots (some of the greatest visual work by a writer ever...)...

the biggest surprises for me, were andersen's collages. he made several collaged scrap/picture books for little girls, and also obsessively covered an 8 panel folding screen with collaged images. the screen looks very much like an early jess or bruce conner piece, and one could easily mistake it for a psychedelic or bay area beat era relic. the collage books are stunning and immediately bring to mind joseph cornell. their use of the space of a page, and images from various sources, with ink and cut outs along with found material, seems totally connected to cornell's best boxes, and also his late collages. they seem precursers to max ernst's collage novels as well.

by the time i was finished at the museum cornell seemed to have come to mind a lot. as humans on the outside they seem like opposites - andersen, almost royalty, traveling the world on the king's dime, and being an international celebrity for much of his life. cornell, largely obscure for much of his life, living with his sick brother and his mother, arguably having little social skills, and quietly going about his obsessive business in virtual solitude until late in life. on the other hand, both were kind of spinsters, both were obsessed with actresses and theatre, and there's absolutely no denying that they shared an approach to collage and to the poetic and mystical qualities of objects (andersen had pressed and saved flowers from both goethe and dickens gardens). i hope someone, someday, curates a show of both of their works.

what was so interesting about seeing the visual output of an artist who considered himself a writer, was the specific approach he had for each of his visual bodies of work, and how each served a different purpose and seemingly came from a different place. the drawings on one end of the scale, being the least personal and the most like snap shots; and the screen, the most obsessive and most personal, created to surround his bed.

i highly suggest clicking on the images here to see them larger. most of the images were taken from the museum's website - click here for a link to their online collections, which is amazing! my own photos, much like andersen's travel sketches hardly capture the things i tried to capture (and i think you can tell which are which!); as usual, have become something else...