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.