Storm Tharp: Lecturar Extraordinaire

I had a delightful studio visit with Storm last week which was lovely as my previous studio visit with a visiting artist (who shall remain anonymous) was depressingly uninspiring. I'm always apprehensive of these because as much as I enjoy talking to the artists and even as much as I appreciate their feedback on my work, the thought of anyone, and especially someone who is only going to see this one glimpse of me, coming into my studio to look at unfinished work made from half-formed thoughts typically makes me want to curl up into a little ball. But, happily, Storm was quite helpful -- positive, but critical and thoughtful -- my favorite kind of critique/studio visit/whatever you want to call it. So thanks, Storm -- you're a superstar. Come back and visit anytime.

Reading List:

The Future of the Image -- Jacques Ranciere
Installation Art in the New Millennium -- Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry
The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993 -- Gerhard Richter
Living inside the Grid -- Dan Cameron

What to focus on...

Disorganized Thought on Order

On the drive home from the lecture tonight, a million things were running through my head. I'm probably going to ramble a bit here, but in an attempt to be more free with this blog and get my thoughts down before they drift too far away, I'm going to try to suppress the desire to edit myself.

I have been thinking a lot about the way I work and the things that seems to be the most constant are the systems I make for myself. I have always liked to organize things. I'm not sure if this is something strange or not. I know certain friends or family members have thought it funny, but I grew up in a house that was very tidy so I've always thought it was kind of normal. Even so, I know it is not something that everyone enjoys. An example: This is a picture of one of the bookshelves in my house. It doesn't look very orderly, but it's actually alphabetized by author and separated by genre. Actually, this particular bookshelf only contains fiction. Non-fiction, poetry, philosophy, reference books, etc...they're all organized separately. Most of the books are tipped over so you see the pages instead of their spines. I thought if I just had some of the books tipped upright it would be more calming and not quite so much a chaotic mess of color.

I sound obsessive-compulsive. But maybe it explains my studio work a little bit: my painting pixels by hand doesn't seem so strange when one considers that I do this type of thing with a lot of things -- some more regular and some not as much. But, in all truth, I've never really given that much thought to it. Or rather, I've thought about the fact that I like to sort things, but I've never thought about it in terms of my art. Neverthless, I feel satisfied whenever I give something order and structure and more and more of this type of thing has been creeping into my work. I think it used to be slightly more subtle -- when I was doing a lot of collage type work, I would spend hours arranging pieces within an image until they were just so but somehow, the effect was hidden under the other layers of paint or wax or whatever else I was using. Now, it seems to be coming more and more readily to the surface.

So I am trying to figure out what it is that attracts me to putting things in order and I guess what I like is creating categories and rules for things. It seems that I'm drawn to the initial categorization and clean organization. The upkeep holds less, if any, interest. Rather, I tend to spend a great deal of time putting something in order only to have it erupt into chaos at some point. Or only to have some wrench thrown in my system. But why? Emily Prince lectured tonight and spent a lot of time talking about her upbringing and how maybe that had something to do with why she liked to form systems for things. Maybe that's the case with me too... or maybe I did it when I was a child for the same unknown reasons I do it now. All I know for sure is that I used to play elaborate games that involved similarly useless forms of organization or repetition. My sister and I would play library and create card catalogs for our books, we'd play school and make calendars for every month, one summer I decided I was going to make a 1000 paper cranes after reading about Sadako in school. I don't think I made it, but I got far closer than you would imagine. I literally spent hours and hours folding them as perfectly as possible and stringing them together in long colorful chains. Basically the only progress I've made since then is that now I have actual deadlines to post on the calendars I make or actual places to show the cranes or whatever objects I produce. I don't know why I'm recounting all of this. I guess I'm just trying to make sense out of what I'm doing now. It's like using art therapy on myself to self diagnose my psychoses. I somewhat feel like I'm running around in circles.

But here's what I do know. When I'm putting things in order, whether it's pieces of paper or dots of paint, I feel this sense of calmness and clarity. It's a meditative quality that I rarely get the rest of the time. When I can put something in it's place, it's like it actually frees up space in my mind for me to think more clearly.

Process

I saw this piece at Aqua Wynwood when I was down in Miami -- It reads: "I wish I could do something quick and spontaneous. But no, everything I do takes forever. For example, this painting took me 56 hours to make. Richard Pettibone 1965." As I paint hundreds of thousands of tiny dots by hand, I feel very much aligned with this sentiment. I've been thinking a lot about my process lately. There is something in me that feels compelled to create work involving long, elaborate processes. Perhaps it's not even so much a need as it is simply the only way in which I am able to translate my view of the world into a physical object. For now, let me ignore whether or not the object is a necessary result and, instead, focus on the reason for this process. I have little desire to document the time I spend on the work other than through the end result of the piece. Perhaps my documentation lies in the traces of my process visible in the final piece, but to make a video of me working or to involve some other time based medium in order to show...what? the tedium involved? That's not the feeling that I have when I work. The time spent is more of a personal meditation for me -- time to let me work out what it is I'm trying to address. Perhaps I paint an organized picture as an attempt to organize my thoughts.

Low-definition

If the aim of high-definition is to erase the structure through which an image is produced -- to mimic reality so much that it in fact almost replaces it -- then my work is an attempt to produce low-definition paintings. Rather than removing the traces of my process, I seek to create a piece that allows those traces to remain visible. By painting the individual pixels from a low-resolution digital snapshot, I can bring the framework that is usually hidden to the foreground of my piece. Instead of mimicking reality, I am mimicking the technology that then mimics reality. In doing so, I hope to arrive at something much closer to the truth than the snapshot could ever provide.

fear and discontent

I was reading about the traditions of arts education over the past century or so and it brought to light some things that I've been struggling with for a while.... The lack of formal training in my education has given me a a lack of confidence in my skill... The push for innovation in what I do combined with the knowledge of how much has already been done has given me a sense of hopelessness of ever creating something truly new. and yet, I know that I have skill -- perhaps not mastery in all technical forms of art, but skill in some parts of it at least -- and I know that I have an individual voice so that whatever I do, whether or not addressed by someone at some time, will be new in that it will be addressed through my point of view and that alone makes it valid.

But why then, if I am so dissatisfied with school, am I back in the academic world... The truth is, despite my feeling that something is missing, I love the academic community. I love being surrounded by people promoting thought and progress and introducing new ideas into my way of thinking. When I'm dissatisfied, I'm unable to pinpoint the origin -- is it really with the institution or is it my own set of rules that I'm struggling against? There has always been a question of how much art can be taught, but that does not mean an academic study is useless: it provides a space for exploration, research, discourse, mentorship -- things that are available outside it's walls as well but not nearly as readily.

Regardless of whether I have or will ever become a successful artist (the definition itself being suspect), the article (When Form Has Become Attitude -- And Beyond by Thierry de Duve) provided an interesting opinion regarding some of the thoughts that have been circulating in my head both in regard to being a student and a teacher of art.

Politics and Art

I came home the other night from reading about new media art with a focus on surveillance to find a letter in my mailbox from the police department. First I thought I'd gotten a speeding ticket, but no -- they had written to tell me that they had peered inside my car while it was parked inside a parking structure downtown and had detected a detachable cd player that might attract car prowlers. Now I suppose I should be glad that nobody actually broke into my car, but I find that I don't like the idea of the police monitoring it all that much more. Maybe I've read too many conspiracy theories, but sometimes I feel like we're slowly sinking into a state like 1984, only it's happening so slowly that no one's going to notice -- it will just all seem completely natural.

I'm glad there are artists commenting with surveillance works and the like, but I still feel like no one's really paying attention to the direction our society is going and I'm not sure what would change that. It's not really the cameras and police that bother me on their own...it's the much bigger problem of the apathy that is allowing those in power to do whatever they want without us noticing or caring. It's things like Bush claiming that waterboarding is not actually torture and no one protesting the ridiculousness of his statement that really gets to me.

How does this relate to art or my MFA? Political artwork used to have a lot of power, but now it seems run of the mill -- we smile and agree that our country is not being run very well and then continue on our way to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks. And now there's this trend of candy-coated, nostalgic work that looks no deeper than the cartoons that were on when we were little -- and it's fun and nice to look at -- but there's this idea that part of the reason it's acceptable for the work to be so insubstantial is that we don't have anything to fight against like the generations before us. So, alright, we don't have WWII, but we are in a war that we didn't agree to led by a president who is getting away with making and breaking rules whenever it pleases him. I don't know if art is part of the solution and I don't know if I'm ready to address any of this in my own work yet, but I think it's something important to consider.

oh capitalism...

selling my work makes me really happy. i think it's kind of addictive -- a somewhat unhealthy, intoxicating validation that i'm pretty sure i should take with a grain of salt. but you have to admit that it's hard to do. even when you know there's so much more to it all than a simple sale or no sale.

"Fossil Fuel" (36"x48") and "Cry Me a River" (48"x48") now happily in the collection of The Romain Group, LLC

Show at Hovel

I have a show opening at Hovel tonight -- 4000 North Mississippi. The work will be up through the first of the year so if you happen to be in the neighborhood, stop in and see it!

redacting information

i've been correcting my painting as i transfer the image from digital pixel to painted pixel. it has occurred to me how ridiculous this is as there is absolutely no way anyone would know that i had made a mistake, but i'm intrigued by the way we always try to hide our mistakes and flaws. it used be somewhat apparent when we tried to cover these up, but with digital technology it's becoming easier and easier to make it seem like it never happened. this manual correction reminds me of wite-out (tm) in the way it deletes information while leaving a trail of the false step. it's so easy to correct something now and make it be/seem (are these the same?) absolutely perfect that it's somewhat exhilarating to admit imperfection.

thinking about wite-out reminded me of documents with redacted text. i suppose these blacked-out areas are the opposite of wite-out, but really it seems like it's all the same thing. perhaps the difference lies in the size of the mistakes or flaws. if it's a grammatical error, then we white it out. if it's a crime, we black it out. i guess this makes sense, but it comes down to the same thing: there's no room for error. we should all live flawless lives and be flawless people. hence botox and my job as a digital retoucher. we are a puritanical society that never really grasped the idea behind the scarlet letter. while i can understand the desire to try to make things better, i can't quite figure out why we'd want to become just like a machine.

The Last Supper

Hal9000 has taken a digital picture of da Vinci's The Last Supper in 16 billion pixels and posted it online. Of course it's not the same as seeing it in person, but it's pretty cool how close you can zoom in.