A Confident Perception

My trip to Virginia via New York proved to bring with it a journey that has carried itself to Maryland's Western Mountains in Deep Creek Lake. My perception of those that surround me is not what I thought it to be. I can pose in front of others as something totally different from the truth but implant in them a thought of adventure based of a little play. Perhaps that is an element of a well-told story: the image that it carries in the first impression.

I was recently contacted by an established author seeking to have me pose as his or her own person during an upcoming tour. Though I was not up for the ride I find the idea to be intriguing. Crowds of people could be made to think that my own vessel bore the thoughts of this other mind. That leaves us up for another question: we are all subjects of our own realities and only through our own perceptions.

Perhaps I could carry with me a satchel of confidence that shows to those who need it that I am very much aware of what it is I am doing. My friend Annie once recently asked me, "How is it that you can be so confident in what you are doing?"

Confidence is only the shrouding surface. The truth is, I am terrified most of the time. I just have the world believe that I am fearless in my endeavours.

Five Cents

If I had five cents for every apology I've made, by God, I would be a millionaire. With that, no apology is being made here for such gaps since the last entry. When one finds that things are too unspeakable to write of at the time there is a bit of a rift in the making and one that offers much more than blindness in the sky.

I have only recently arrived from an early morning Taxi ride from which I passed a number of minute landmarks that were all too telling of my evening. Sparing the details I can only note that if they say life is too short than why are so many daring? They dare pretend that their precious moments are to be kept, that their precious pieces are to be locked away until the very last moment when they realize that they are thirty going on forty, single, and living in the smallest apartment.

Well then, my friends, my sweet little friends I have been so privileged to spend an evening with, I beg you to continue this little life of yours and to ignore anything I have to offer in terms of friendship. Look at this life as a paycheck and search for the easiest way into retirement but do not expect such people to court these ways. What madness do you breed with lifestyles of indebted happiness? And why, what is it all for that you sacrifice these things for a day to day sink full of dishes?

Five cents could be better spent on an explanation.

Star of Life

It was three in the morning when the mumbling voice of a southern woman pierced through the moldy air. I had been sleeping in uniform with my boots laced, ready for the tones to be dropped at any moment.

"Rise and shine, train s'leavin'," came the voice of the overnight shift. She pounded her fist against the faux-wood walls and made her way into the garage. I pulled over the single sheet I found in the corner earlier that evening and briefly questioned why I had signed up for this.

I packed into the back with J and strapped myself into the seat across from him as the overnight shift turned the keys to the rusty 3-2 unit. The sirens broke the early morning air as we sailed on empty streets winding into the outskirts of Warrenton, Virginia.

"In for a rough ride," said the overnight with a sly smile as we veered off the road into a wooded valley. After what seemed like several minutes we stopped and I climbed out of the back with J. We looked over to see the remnants of a two-story house that had been converted into a ground level shack. An old man lacking teeth and northern civility ran through the front doors screaming about his dying brother.

We piled into the small kitchen covered in flies and cockroaches as another old man lay strewn across the floor chapped with dried blood. His brother leaned over him terrified and blaming as we lifted his sick brother to his feet.

A cop arrived with his hand stroking the velvet handle as we treated the drunken patient with flashlights and words. A distant clock struck four before we headed on our way through a roadless route and found ourselves returning into the wintered streets longing for the comfort of a solitary sheet.

This Gift

I have been stale for a month. I have thought of you often. It is not time that I have lacked, merely the words. I refuse to cater to the mediocre. I do not allow for half-filled entryways.

It is not that I have lacked a story. There have been many. Far too many, in fact. My relationships have shifted since we last spoke. Life has taken a detour as it does, leaving our normal route for one far less scenic.

He is a story, sleeping on my bed, resting before tomorrow morning's critique. He is more than a story. A story can only grow separate from the actual events that are frozen, but he is a friend who grows with those that witness the events of the story. I cannot say that it was circumstance of how we met. I can not say it was coincidental or fate; it is nothing short of sure-shot or meant-to-be—it simply happened.

I wish I could tell truths. I wish I did not see so blindly. But these are unsustainable realities; I need not dwell on that which dwelling is not needed. Surely it could have happened some other way.

It was noon-thirty short of one when we sat in The Gage between critiques. He sipped his Harp with repose as I stayed sober with my coke. We stared forward towards the tarnished mirrors marveling after the colored and cherished liquids. It is here that a quote would follow but his words I can not recall. I can only remember the accepting disappointment. I am content with friendship. I am content with this gift.

He might as well have paid this month's rent.

Still Looking

People are beautiful and they need to start believing that. The only skin you need to show is the skin of your own truths: that which sheds the shell and reveals the core, the seed.

I came across nearly a dozen people today who have trouble coming to terms with the truth of beauty. Passing by the digitized Prada advertisements has led to the non-fact selections, malnutrition and obsessive dieting for so many. Billboards boast non-existent form and these people keep pushing themselves further down the line with less to clothe themselves with.

They are picking up threesomes in the late evenings and relying on others for their own. Where are we going with all of this? Take a look around and realize that the only one that really cares is you.

Seed for the Eden

I am questioning the subtle mindset craving attention. Friendships are broken through these little games that people play. The key to finding success is to create the bridge to get there. So many of us spend years and lifetimes trailing the brink and awaiting for the last-crossed bridge to bring us to salvation on a silver platter; yet the fundamentals of life are not through self-absorbed meanderings.

I am nowhere near where I want to be, I am barely beginning to cross my most
recent bridges; but I look for the signs I've placed along the way to remind me of where I have been. One door has led to a hallway filled with an infinite number of doors of a different finish and lock. I have no worry as to how I shall cross them, or when it is that I will do so. I have found that walking these subconscious halls allow for the satisfaction of that which is precious to me.

One might find my conquest to be rather internally selfish but I beg to differ. I unlock the door to further myself, yes, but I do not leave behind anyone who has helped me along the way. There are those who cast themselves aside, who drift from the halls of my past into a world that is unknown to them and to me. These are, sadly, the facts of life; the loss of friendships and of simple bonds is a stepping stone towards an understanding of those who hold the light around the threshold.

There are opportunities arising but they have not come out of the sporadic or the spontaneous. Never alone have I found the budding seeds for Eden. Never alone have I crossed these paths and never alone shall I continue to explore the endless doors that are continuously leading.

Somerville

I arrived in Virginia yesterday afternoon—not without adventure, of course. Never lacking a dull moment I found myself sharing classic conversation (that is, class) over tea with Gran.

"Mrs. Somerville said she wanted you to look at Brendan's art supplies, see if there is anything you might need."

During the latter part of his life Brendan Somerville, the late husband of Betty Somerville, dedicated countless hours to perfecting artistic craft. Though not well known (yet) he is no stranger to the Vienna community in Virginia and is most known there for his carefully crafted watercolors.

Having been welcomed into the home with the open arms only the Irish can give I mused over what truly was a lifetime of work despite the time in which they were done. His hand was apparent through the pen, and vivid through his direct choice of color. Such a medium does not allow for a mistake, it does not permit a guess and with this Brendan presented the breadth of his knowledge of the colors of this world through series upon series of works giving a pictorial description of the simplicity of detail and the beauty of the natural.

"Only the best," said Mrs. Somerville of the tools and papers that Brendan used throughout his work. And it was true; the man who truly understood the aesthetics of paper had collected handmade paper made from the finest materials from all around the world.

She poured through his craft as one would over a collection of photographs. But no picture could capture Brendan more than his art and the tools he used to make them. To me, she gave his satchel he used to encase his supplies during travel, never further than his reach, as well as several tools for drawing and sets of brushes with watercolors that show evidence of use. The pieces vibrate with the energies of a neurotic artist whose cleanliness serves as the perfect example for any artist in this field.

I took them with gratitude beyond that which I can fully express and with a sympathy for the wife of a man who showed many of us just how beautiful the world is.

Sculpting Reflections

When I sat to lay the first courses that would introduce a new angle of my education I bore in mind what sculpture I had experienced; I had seen the masters of marble and stone, those who can wield metallic structure with architectural feat and agility and the conventional solitary installations that were inviting only in their craft. Having woken up from a daunting sleep in the realm of sculpture I have found that the breadth of work in the public had not met my idea of the art, that my perspective was mere ignorance. I expected to walk into the classroom prepared to perfect and mold a block of clay and was instead given a priceless invitation into a dimensional and limitless world of the fresh and decayed. These artists and ideas have become a part of the fabric that strings together a web of ideas and affects the remotest perimeter in a way that the slightest influence can stick to be consumed by the widowed muse.

The unconventional atmosphere of the Alogan Gallery added a specificity that is apparent only in presence. I felt like I walked into the ruins of art that had, at one time, been, and since then had burnt out. The overwhelming and countless pieces of sequence served as a distraction that I could only attune to the gayest [most homosexual] version of sand grain I have ever seen. As the floor was suffocating under a gay pride parade, the walls were confused with work. Whether it was the intention of the artists or not I felt a complete sense of disparity between the works. One of the artists present spoke of collaboration but I could see little relation between the work and this disturbed me—not exactly my idea of collaboration. I did not feel that the space complemented all of the works as some seemed awkwardly placed, notably the barking pig, fragments of performance, the empty cot and keg (the latter of which was most disturbing upon the visit) in addition to the exhausting titles which served to break my concentration. HKG-ORD, otherwise known as the “Vagina-Buddha” was one of the few compelling pieces in the gallery. The thought put behind the piece in relation to religion, culture and society epitomized my ideal artistic attraction. I found most of the other pieces, though an interesting thought, to be considerably dull.

It was rather unfortunate that many of the pieces could not stand for themselves and had to be explained. Perhaps Alogon could benefit from an additional installation of plaques so as to provide an explanation for pieces that would otherwise appear just as they were: light-burnt sheets, cheap stolen billboards, and a pile of extensions.

Ben Fain’s presentation, however, was among one of the more inspiring presentations I have seen from an artist. His composure of quiet confidence attuned the pensive observationist, which was apparent throughout his work. I found the intricacy and scale to be absolutely stunning and moreover, compelling. Last Saturday during Chicago’s hideous and embarrassing St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Ben could be seen standing on a ledge outside the school entrance on Columbus Drive taking subtle notes of the passerby. His work is well researched, developed, and intriguing. I felt strongly that his work could be easily defended and could hold its own in the world of the contemporary.

These past few weeks have not lacked in inspiration. I feel as excited as those who discovered fire having successfully built my first box and moved onto the beginnings of multi-dimensional thinking. A box could be as simple as sanded panels if it was not for the concept that held together the seams. Without the fire to create, the result is a piece that will, over time, become threadbare—worn and forgotten like a child’s sock. As manifesto, in a perfect world the artist will strive for immortality with a work that will transcend the fragility of our form. Sculpture celebrates that world of form and brings to it a rift of hope that life can be sustained beyond the medical and the miracle. If anything I find sculpture to be the tool that taps into a side of humanity that is sensitive and ever longing to strike the water from the stone.

Aesthete

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and difficult forms of expressionism is through the abstract. Action painting, a form of abstract expressionism (depending on the critic) compels the observer (or as Allan Kaprow calls it the “participant”) to actively engage in the action of the painting, and to carry the thought within the canvas beyond the canvas transcending the boundaries of frame and dimension. However, the very process, purpose and influence of action painting has been widely discussed and debated since its inception into the art world. With this in mind, our brief discussion on action painting will focus on the essays of Harold Rosenberg (“Action Painting”) and Allan Kaprow (“The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”). The two authors offer priceless insight into the world of action painting through the general process (exemplified by Jackson Pollock) its purpose and the influence it plays in the modern world.

Harold Rosenberg’s critical outlook on action painting was published in the December 1952 edition of Art News. Rosenberg described the introduction of the painters’ outlook on the canvas as more than a simple space for expressive observation but an “arena in which to act.” The action of painting became an act of theatre, so to speak, which resulted in the completion of an image in the same way the fragments of a performance piece end in sculpture. Rosenberg describes this unique take on painting stating that, “what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Action painting was the beginning of the end, shedding the aesthetic and the object for the conceptual and the expressionist. Rosenberg describes a major part of this experience as a “drama of self” for the artist and an autobiographical experience whether during the making or their paralleling lives (that is, between the painter and the canvas). However the deeper meaning of action painting, according to Rosenberg, is no mere brush on the classical or a selfish act of defiance; the act of action painting is a spiritual journey—religious in itself. This esoteric take on action painting describes how “The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted the canvas to be a world. Liberation from objects meant liberation from ‘nature,’ society and art already there.” Action painting offers an ethereal platform for which the painter defies aestheticism in pre-dictated form.

Some have argued that action painting is merely child’s play and perhaps this is not entirely false. Allan Kaprow’s October 1958 essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” describes the brilliance of Pollock based on his “amazingly childlike [approach], capable of becoming involved in the stuff of his art as a group of concrete facts seen for the first time.” And indeed Pollock’s work could easily be described as childlike discovery, which may have been biographical of a nostalgic artist. Kaprow introduces the article with a poetic eulogy to the famed artist who “was, perhaps, the embodiment of our ambition for absolute liberation.” But his essay is more than a slight study of Pollock’s life and work, Kaprow outlines the legacy Pollock created with his innovative action paintings that were in themselves entire worlds that transcended the canvas and “became environments.” Pollock’s paintings captivated the essential concept of action painting having developed a breadth of work that has been scattered around the world and baffled participants—Kaprow’s insisted term—for years.

The two essays address a vital truth in the world of art: action painting has truly changed the way we look at art. Rosenberg describes one of the basic principles of action painting as, “an act [that] is inseparable from the biography of the artist.” Kaprow carefully places Pollock alongside this accepted angle of the art, literally, saying, “Pollock could truthfully say that he was ‘in’ his work.” This is true: Pollock was known to actively participate in his action paintings stretching across the canvas and becoming an extension of the painting and vice versa. Rosenberg’s proclamation that the work of an action painter is inevitably autobiographical is reflective of the process Pollock used throughout his career as a painter (i.e. dripping, splattering, pouring, etc). Because of this, it can easily be argued that Pollock is revered as one of the most renowned and celebrated action painters having truly taken to heart what Rosenberg calls an “arena in which to act.”

However the two essays do have some points in opposite directions. Rosenberg clearly describes his views of action painting as a complete act of defiance on the aesthetic world, the world we observe and that which is seen. With this, Rosenberg believes the action painting to not be a painting of the world we see, but the world of the painter (See Note 5). Kaprow, however, describes some of Pollock’s works as gateways for the participant as opposed to a world for the observer. He states that in Pollock’s “older work, the edge…ended the world of the artist; beyond began the world of the spectator…Pollock gives us an all-over unity and at the same time a means continuously to respond to a freshness of personal choice.” Though Rosenberg describes the action painting to be strictly confined to the artist’s world, Kaprow describes some of the works of Pollock as a participatory and subjective experience.

For my personal endeavors I find Rosenberg’s critical analysis of abstract expressionism to be the most compelling of the two because it serves as a pedestal for the my personal practice. He concludes the painter’s goal of a “constant No to rid one’s self of the ‘real’ and aesthetic limitations of painting up till this point in modern art and to create a different world symbolic to the artist’s life, or (in other words) autobiographical. I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray where Wilde says, among other things, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” Everything Wilde states in the preface to his novel complements the very purpose of action painting, which— in Rosenberg’s perspective—is to transcend aesthetics and to reveal a created world. Wilde warns that, “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.” It is with this warning and a final bold statement (“All art is quite useless”, stated in a time of pioneered Realism) that Wilde begins his allegorical tale for the misfortunes of a particular soul evidencing the preface to his novel. It is shown that indulgence of pleasurable meandering and excess in the aesthetic world is poisoning, particularly when the character Dorian Gray reads “The Yellow Book” which has been identified as the French novelist J.K. Huysmans’ Á Rebours. Á Rebours pioneered decadent literature, revealing the twisted life of the aesthete Des Esseintes. The poisoning indulgence of Des Esseintes is parallel to that of Dorian Gray whose portrait is tarnished with age and sin as time is marked. These extreme examples of intrinsic art exemplify my practice that art should reveal little of the aesthetic or the literal (like action painting), renouncing imitation and celebrating originality through the unique.

Paradox

I sat quietly in the shadow of the flickering fluorescent northbound on the red line as the train pushed up sparks, stopping in Jackson. A boy of twenty-one I had met once on an elevator walked in confidently struggling to make room for his ego in the compact car. His diamond earrings looked like burning stars in the wilting light as he sat down with his friend of a similar air.

This is the boy who turned to me on the elevator, having never met me before, and told me how he once "fucked a bitch" on the El when he was drunk. He laughed about it. He took care to recount every detail: how he pulled her hair tightly between his greasy fingers and shoved her against the second car from the last like a plastic toy. He was, in my eyes, a living example of repulsion; my notion of him was forever marred by his raping pride.

Sick.

And yet, here he was, walking freely into the set of his previous violent scenes as if oblivious to crimes he once committed. He looked into the windows which made a black mirror by the darkness of the tunnel and stared into his own beady eyes. The narcissist stared back longing for the beauty behind the pane. He pulled on his four-hundred dollar shades and touched his hand to the reflection.

A beggar pitched the flickering passengers with pitiful prose. With a strange gesture, the narcissistic boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a fresh roll of green twenties. I thought his intention was to tease. He licked his finger with a sinister smile and pulled out a five summoning the beggar to come closer. Tease. And when I was so sure I was about to witness another cruel scene on his favorite playground, the boy placed the five into the beggar's cup. So it is that the cruel can be kind and the kind can be cruel.