Brushing my teeth with Duchamp.

This morning, I was standing brushing my teeth, looking at two sliding, frosted-pane windows, a gap between them showing a verdant scene of ferns and redwoods beyond. And I thought how nice that would be as a painting, the whole thing: the glass windows and the small sliver of the natural world. In my imagination, I entered the world of the figurative painters, who find ways to narrate and to depict. What happened? What was Duchamp's purpose of art? The oft-repeated story is that Duchamp came along and radically re-oriented the art world (over the course of the century) from viewing/experiencing pleasure to intellectual rigor and questioning, which led to our contemporary interest in conceptual art. Sometimes, the two go together, which only confuses things. After all, his signed urinal was a pleasant, smooth form, especially by today's standards. But then: he did end up quitting art entirely and playing chess in his old age, turning himself into the statement of denial, his everydayness his artwork. Or perhaps he was just escaping the gravitational pull of the famous artist myth, escaping the pressure to do one thing better always until the world burns down.

The latest work to get my attention.

I admit: I'm spending more of this blog talking about the work of others rather than my own. That's fine. I'm not making much lately, and there is much to be celebrated out there. The most recent piece I've come across that gets me excited is Walter DeMaria's "The Vertical Earth Kilometer." (1977, Kassel Germany). See it in the photo? No, not the statue, or the landscaping. It's that square of sandstone in the middle. The 2x2m block has a visible 5cm diameter end of a brass rod . . . The rod is one kilometer long.

The magnitude of the effort involved in this work borders on the absurd. Yet, it is more than simply conceptual: it is an actual reality, a mostly invisible, extremely ambitious undertaking than calls into question what is beneath the surface. Just what does it mean to go that far into the earth? A friend of mine suggested that the work is "almost a violation of the planet, intrusive." Of course, this is one of many: think of the hundreds of thousands of such cores drilled all over the planet. This is just the only one that has been filled back in as if in an acupuncture of the Earth's crust.

I can only imagine that to stand on this platform and reach down to touch the end of this rod is to feel something deep, in the stomach, a kind of encounter with the awesome magnitude of our planet's dimensions and the almost insignificant scale that we occupy.

The link with more info about this work: http://www.diacenter.org/sites/page/57/1378

Why this blog is preventing my success.

I recently looked up on the web to see if painter Barnaby Furnas had a website. It doesn't appear so. Apparently, successful artists have other people make websites for them. Preferably galleries, museums, and Wikipedia. I wondered: at what point in an artist's career do they abandon the website? It was suggested to me: at your first museum show. So is my attempts at reaching out to the world actually sabotaging my efforts to have a museum show? Probably less than my lack of effort at making large volumes of new work. It does always come back to that, doesn't it?

Apologies to Furnas for reprinting this tiny picture of "The Whale." The painting is the same size as a killer whale: 30 feet long. It completely occupies the field of vision.

SFMOMA

Recently, I visited the San Francisco museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Half the museum was closed for an exhibit installation, so the entry fee was half price, making it slightly cheaper than the parking in downtown SF. Upon my first walk through the 70th anniversary show, I was struck by Jay DeFeo's The Veronica:
It feels alive to me, as if created by the very same natural processes employed in the wilderness. I think that art serves this purpose, particularly for city-dwellers: to get in touch with wildness. To wit: Thoreau's frequently misquoted "In wildness is the preservation of the world."

India. 9 weeks. And all I saw was this pile of scraps in front of a tailor's shop.

No, there was more. Much more. But that's what comes up first. Color. Lots of color:

Women in the fields lifting large bundles of plants up on their heads, wearing bright red or green or pink sarees. Festivals with neon-colored powder thrown on participants. The orange pigment applied to the forehead in a dot. Even the cows get painted, the horns: one red, one green. The soft fuzzy sunrise in Varanasi, a hot orange blob of sun coming up in a tender pink and orange haze coating the far bank. Bright yellow auto rickshaws zipping around. Bike rickshaws made of shiny sheetmetal nailed onto a wooden frame, handpainted with scrollwork, italic lettering, peacocks, flowers. LED lights in synchronized color-changing pulsing patterns illuminating one of the temples in the BodhGaya complex, beside the Maha Bodhi temple commemorating the spot where the Buddha was enlightened. The deep green of transplanted Eucalyptus trees in Kodai Kanal, where the air smelled like Northern California. The men's "skirts," called Lunghi, with an infinite variety of incredible plaid patterns. Mostly blues and greens, however. Some grey. Almost never red. Temples with every color of the rainbow depicting deities in painting or statues that were also painted with thick shining color. Rivers black with pollution. Bright green parrots. Red-ass monkeys. Corridors between apartments with every color fabric swaying in the wind to dry. Dusty brown dirt fields for soccer. Headlights of trucks and rickshaws replaced with computer-controlled changing light displays. The amazing national bird: the peacock with shimmering green and blue.

Just finished a residency at the Town of Breckenridge, CO. In their art district, they have a building called the "Tin Shop," where I worked for 10 days. Although I was having a show of my burnt cloth pieces nearby at the Theater Gallery, I decided to focus the residency on exploration, making pieces that I don't usually work on, such as painting, ceramics, and installation. I discovered that working this way, outside of one's comfort zone, is probably not best done in public. However, it is interesting to watch the effects (and possibly the intensification of the feelings because of immediate display). Here is what I ended up with (having to stop after days of not knowing when to stop):