Part Zwo.

The Cutting Board Experiment, v. 1

Of late.

First things first. It has been freezing. Below freezing. Below zero at times. It has to be mentioned, because there is no escaping it.

In about a week, I leave for Barcelona. In my (final) German class last week, we were discussing our feelings and experiences relating to 'die Fremde' (foreign countries). I said (as best I could) that I enjoy traveling best when I know little about a new place, because it leaves me more open to new experiences. The downside of this is that there are also things that I wind up finding out about after I've been somewhere that I would have loved to see. I'm hoping that travel in a group where all have guide books (although I don't think any of us have been before) will give me a good intro to the city, major site wise, and that I can take some wandering trips and find some of the other things that dwell in Barcelona. I asked someone to meet up on CouchSurfing, my first time doing so.

In the meantime, I've been doing lots of transcription work. Alice Aycock has been brought to my attention, someone I didn't know before. I should never have cancelled my ArtForum subscription, I never know what's going on anymore. Her sculptures are not of much interest to me, but the drawings are worth some further study.

I've also been spending a bit of time printing at Spudnik Press, which recently moved into the building I work at. It's been mostly a refresher at this point, a bit of screenprinting to see if I remember how. In the spring they are having an intaglio class, which I plan to take. I've always thought etching would be an interesting medium for me. In the meantime, I think screenprinting may lend itself nicely to my work.





I think paintings like the two above (there are more at my website) would work well in print form. But also, ones like the following, which comes from a series of similar houseplant paintings, might be more appropriate as a smaller series of prints (perhaps mounted together) than as a disparate series of paintings:



Some stuff to think about. For now, I'm thinking about sketching and drinking some red wine in warmer climes.

Words that I like for their sounds:

Mustachioed.

Corporeality.

Antiquarian.

Did you know that the Library of Congress had a flickr account?

NOW YOU DO

The internet works! An anonymous internet donor (hi, mom) has funded some art supply buying! New canvases have been stretched and primed, and await paint. At the Art Institute of Chicago last week I saw a painting by Brice Marden which had some beeswax mixed into the paint. When I used to use encaustics (pigmented beeswax), the texture of the paint was always somewhat distracting. But this painting was smooth, the paint beautifully matte and opaque. I think this could be something to consider in my own work, as I tend to paint in thin layers and the texture of the canvas shows through.

The animation is slugging along, and I'm thinking of taking advantage of the printmaking studio that opened up in my work building to make a set of screenprinted 'ex libris' labels. Mostly just for fun, but fun is good, too.

A bit of personal bragging: DAVID BYRNE CONCERT LAST NIGHT. Those of you who know me in the analog world know my love of the former Talking Heads frontman, so it's no surprise that I would cough up however much I did to sit in the dark and listen to him do his thing. I saw him in '04 in Rome (I think it was the Grown Backwards tour?) and swore I would see him whenever I could. This show was promoting the Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, which I linked to because you can stream the whole album digitally. It's a collaboration with Brian Eno, which meant that they played a selection of old Talking Heads songs which were also a collaboration with Eno. Which means awesomeness. Fantasy-goal of dancing to live performances of Life During Wartime, Houses In Motion, The Great Curve and Once In A Lifetime fulfilled.

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I think I have mentioned my lack of funds on this blog. I've decided to use this time to make a short animation along the lines of the squid animation I did in college (which I perennially lose every time a computer dies and therefor cannot link to). I am going to animate the man in a ditch drawings into a short piece.

I decided this when I woke up this morning. I have my best ideas before noon.

I heard on NPR this morning, while washing a mountain of dishes, that the type of TV people watch influences their dreams. I kid you not, last night I dreamt an entirely original, full-color-animation episode of Futurama. I remember waking up afterwords, in the middle of the night, thinking that I had to remember that I dreamt that. But I didn't remember what 'the episode' was about.

It's a shame, because I could have sold it to Matt Groening for some money, which is exactly what I need right now. I've got 22 paintings hanging on my walls and three more unfinished in the studio, but I'm out of the supplies I need to continue. I've got a few oddly sized stretcher bars left, but no canvas. Work is slowing down, a combination of seasons and economic hoodoo, and I lack the funds to go out and buy more at the moment. [Next week?]

I'm trying to continue the visual presentation of information idea, but the paintings still feel a bit empty. The conflict I'm having is that that's kind of the point- they are intended to not convey any information. Ideally, they point to the fact that the 'informational' images I am using don't actually convey any information themselves. I'm just having a hard time getting them to convey THAT and not just look like failed nature studies or something. I'm hoping that as a group it will start to make more sense. That the connections between the individual pieces will lead the viewer a bit. For now, I'll be trying to work it out further in drawings I guess. Which could be a good thing in the end, I always let my drawing practice die.

In other news, there is a website now! If you got to this blog through a link on the site (Hi, Mom!), you already know. But if not, here's a link to stephanierohlfs.com. You can see a decent (and hopefully quickly expanding) selection of paintings and photos there. No drawings up yet.

a few of these for now.

I feel like I'm getting better at the Holga, although I can see how the accidents of the film (especially the blocks of tone shift in the first few) make it more interesting in a way that I can't. I like the alchemy of a Holga photo. It's a somewhat disorienting thing to take a photo without really focusing or metering or timing the exposure. It's always the shots that I'm not looking forward to getting back that are the best; the most surprising at least.

I would like to be able to see in a way more appropriate to a Holga. I think right now I see in a 35mm SLR way. I would like to have an eye with a bit of chaos in it.

I included that last shot (well, a little bit because it's silly) because when I looked at it just now, going through which to post, i had this moment of 'oh, my god. that's me'. And I don't mean my face. I mean, that's me, sort of half-visible and floating. Transparent. I'm moody lately, and homesick, it's true. But even more than that I feel this strange pull between being disgusted by the fact that I don't do anything that I want to do, and this weird stagnation/lack of interest in doing those things.

I feel like that's exactly what I would say to a psychiatrist in order to get a very interesting prescription.

But I'm trying, I guess. It's more accurate to say that I'm trying to try. I'm reading Slavoj Zizek's The Parallax View, and it's re-connecting some neurons. [I always hear the word parallax pronounced in the Russian accent of the girl in my college physics class. pah-rhah-lahx.] It's inspiring me, but I still feel so dwarfed by everything. I also checked out recently a book on German history, which should help me start to contextualize Gerhard Rohlfs a little bit. What I'm doing is sort of like trying to explain to someone the history of Chinese grammar, only I don't speak a word of Chinese.

I like the idea of making a movie that's about him, but simultaneously about my making a movie of him and about that movie. That's the loosest possible way I can explain this, I think.

In the meantime, I've more or less stopped painting. I've been dragging my heels to finish one particular canvas, but I haven't taken the time to stretch any more. It just doesn't feel right right now. I can't honestly say if it ever did/does. I enjoy it, but a life's work...? I don't know. Thinking feels right. That's all I've ever known. And lately I've let myself get out of the habit of even that.

No more.

brain flash

Over-stimulation/under-stimulation -> death of symbols.

humans need symbols -> need to think abstractly ->structure of language

death of old symbols -> birth of new symbols

world too large? -> too many people? -> symbols no longer universal

uninterpretable symbols -> bad art

red moon (2005)

tonight i saw a red moon
and grey clouds drifting across
and i thought of how you were real
and how much that scared me.
and i thought of how you give me
little moments of laughter
gurgling up from inside,
even when you're not around.
and i thought of how many times i've come so close
to messing this all up
and how glad i am that you
just laugh at me and go on.
and in my head i sent you a postcard.
wish you were here.

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(i used to write love poems)

the shell (2005)

i ground it right into my skin.
straight through the thin of my back,
pale and luminescent in the moonlight under that bridge.
my spine arching through my skin
to taste the powder
now mingling with blood.

i could have imagined it.
afterwords,
four shards remained
-the only evidence of a treasured gift-
like little white teeth worn
down from gnawing my body.

the rest of it gone.

blown into the river below, perhaps,
dust settling on an intrusive bullfrog.
likely most of it was left on our perch,
unseen by the little boy zeus and i
long tired from climbing and sweating together.

at night, when my body misses you most
-the lonely hours when i pretend it's not the sheet touching me but your hands-

i like to think it's been absorbed.
sneaking in somehow through some crack in my spine,
sleepwalking up to rest, maybe, in the space behind my eyes
or joining the fabric of my skin.
Or better, hardening into my nails,
the very ones i use to dig your back.
we hurt each other like this.

Listening to On The Media in my studio this weekend, I was lucky to hear a story about the age of the 'petabyte', a term I hadn't known of before. (Before I go any further, you can find the transcript here.) The man being interviewed was the editor of Wired Magazine, which strikes me as a bit odd. But it fits in nicely with the essence of the story, in a way.

Apparently scientist have started to look at data and process it in the way that Google processes data. There's no point in my trying to paraphrase:

Chris Anderson: You know, the old way of understanding who we are and what we do was to use kind of conventional human techniques, what’s called semantic analysis. So the old form of search, for example, was to try to understand, you know, what is this page about? And Google sort of said, give up, that, you know, you could do that once or twice but it doesn't scale to the huge volume of the Internet.

The way page rank works is they say, we don't know anything about this page but we do know that these other sites link to it. So what they're saying is there was a connection between this site and these highly ranked sites and those sites that are connected to those other sites.

And what we have here is a correlation but we don't know anything about causation. We don't know why they link to each other.

It's sort of an interesting reversal and move forward in the same step. (Is this equivalent to spinning around?) It reminds me of the process of categorizing butterflies or something, trying to figure out what species are connected, and constantly re-categorizing them based on a deeper level of understanding. But it also seems frightening, like pseudo-science that's prone to being all to easily misinterpreted by someone needing it for their own ends. Scientists don't study butterflies anymore; or at least not how they used to. It's a little frightening, this "we don't know why they link to each other" thing.

It started me thinking about how if we don't know where things come from, but they continue to function without us... I can't express it properly. I'm talking about man made things, though. Culture and science specifically. But it's almost a feeling of "Well, I hope everybody before me did everything right, because it's too late for me to fix it now, since nobody knows what's going on anyway."

"I come from outside."

Excuse the poor photo. Just a snapshot taken after working. But I wanted to post it for two reasons.

1) To prove that I am working. And to prove it not so much to whoever reads this (no one?) but to myself. That's more or less the point of this blog. To sort out thoughts and keep some sort of motivation going, but also to sort of broadcast myself. Not for 15 minutes of fame reasons, but more just because if I tell enough people that I'm working, then I had better really be working.

2) To continue the 'conversation' about what I'm painting about lately. This painting is so preliminary, it's a bit hard to tell what's going on. But it's not an aquarium, it's a wall full of taxidermied fish on display in a museum. This fits alongside the paintings of house plants and other taxidermied animals in the series about how we catergorize information. (I should mention that the colors are in progress, and the shapes have yet to be refined. It just took me forever to get the layout of all those damn fish in the right place.)

Trying to keep my mind in a certain place, I've been keeping myself occupied categorizing things for myself. Keeping track of perms and faces I see on the bus...observing things. I've come up with the phrase (mantra?) "I come from outside." I have it written on an index card and tacked up in my kitchen. It's a reminder to stay where I am and keep watching and processing and making drawings about it.

Here is a painting that I entered in the Exclamation Gallery's upcoming Superior Floor System show. All the paintings had to be on 12x12 inch floor tiles, and all the work will be installed as actual floor tiles and eventually destroyed when gallery guest walk on them.



The image on the linoleum tile is actually the image from another linoleum tile that I bought. I had originally intended to have two tiles and transfer each image onto the other tile, but (I think due to heat) the tiles would warp and bend during the process. So it wound up as just one, but I think it's still alright. I was intrigued by the idea of painting on a tile and wanted to get a bit into the idea of 'what is a tile?'. The purpose of this painting was to see if having this tile look like another tile would change it at all.

In the grueling hours I spend avoiding being in my studio (at least I'm honest about it) I've been getting a lot of reading done. Yesterday I got and finished Augusten Burrough's book Dry, which I found pretty interesting. I don't think I'm that dark, really. But this memoir about an alcoholic's descent and rise and descent along with several semi-disturbing side-stories did amount to light reading. I sometimes wonder if people who've been in car crashes still rubber-neck on the highways, desperate to get a glimpse and re-live the un-relivable. To put it a bit more how I mean it: I wonder if people who've had loved ones be in car crashes without them and wind up paralyzed stare at car crashes where other people were paralyzed and try to understand it better.

I've also been reading a biography called Young Stalin, which is interesting because I know almost nothing about Stalin except that he has a moustache and wore a lot of those Nehru-collared military jackets. At least in my mind he did. What little I know about the horrors of his time 'in office' I won't demean with trying to explain it. So it's this funny thing of discovering some things that nobody knew about a man everybody knows about but me.

I also applied to a show in a local art collective dealing with ideas of written communication. I entered these three pieces, and hopefully they will be accepted. Or at least the triptych - I'm dying to get rid of it.

(note: apparently this is a big as i can post images for now. I'll fix these when I figure out the frame system)

Uwe Niggemeier

In the course of transcribing some interviews to pick up some extra cash from my mom (who runs an art-friendly transcription company) I listened to an interview with Uwe Niggemeier, a photographer from Germany who specializes in industrial photography. The focus is on metalworking factories: steel mills, iron mills, coke plants, etc. The photographs are shot either black-and-white or color on large or medium format cameras, and then scanned into a computer and printed digitally. The depth of field and strange lighting are interesting. I have a personal preference for the more abstract images, the ones that maybe lean more toward the aesthetic than the documentary. The site is navigable in German and English, and the photos are organized by location or by type of factory.

A Personal Update

Much has changed, and little has really changed at all.

I'm back in Chicago, living alone this time. Still seeing many of the same people, still a florist, but with lots of changes. It's hard for me not to see myself as a tiny ant, and all these changes as so amazingly unimportant, although the past year has been completely unstable and confusing. I'm in a sort of practical state of mind these days. I have little patience for the standard (Chicago) cast of hustlers, drug dealers and prostitutes of one sort or another. I'm over the novelty of it and believe it or not I find it boring at this point. I don't think this is a sign of my continuing detachment as much as it is a sign of RE-attachment to something else. Something more pure, and more exciting anyway. I do admit to being relatively boring these days: working too much, cooking sometimes, drinking a little and fucking not at all. Painting never. But things are turning around. Balances are resetting themselves and life promises to be good, assuming we ever get nights that are above 40 degrees.

I'm trying to work in earnest on this film project, but I feel dwarfed by the idea of it. I often wish I was more passionate or less logical and could just do things. Because I know that if I tried to tackle it I could, it's purely a mental block. Fear of failure, or more likely fear of success. But I've been poking about in some source material. I can't decide if it's important that I translate (and make available) the German texts or just be able to understand them and use them for my own ends. I think the latter is the direction I'm leaning in. I found a cheap (or at least affordable) ticket to Germany that leaves from Philly, so I'm hoping to get to Bremen sometime this year and get a bit of research and taping done(?). It's a scary thing to try to bring an idea out of the ether and take responsibility for it- bring it to life. It's so much easier not to, and I hate myself for being so often so very lazy.

As far as paintings are concerned, the 'domestic' ideas I was talking about in the last post have morphed into something more about categorization in general. I'm fairly fascinated by the way everything human culture is is based on words and abstract ideas that can't be really COMPLETELY defined. Maybe that's why we all feel so lost and confused all the time - it's difficult to stand balanced on a shifting surface. But the domestic (or at least common) objects remain a source of interest because of the blindness that familiarity brings. I tried to define a deck of cards via organization of the cards based upon their characteristics and could come up with no solid results. I have also decided that days and various other demarcations of time are too relative to be considered real, and therefore do not exist in the way that we know them. I wonder how detached I can get before it gets really unhealthy.