dayton is not in ohio

Today I officially became a nerd. I was called by that name on occasion in middle school, but the truth is that while I possessed the dorkiness of a nerd, I couldn’t do any of the cool nerdy things that a true nerd does. Today, I graduated, by making this:

Now, to be fair, I am not a high ranking nerd, I have a long way to go before I make a fridge that can retrieve a cold beer and throw it to me from across the room while I lounge on the couch (and it will never happen wearing a Dook shirt). But this is what makes me a nerd (note the italicized terms): I built a circuit that uses three TIP-120 transistors, a 24vdc power supply, and an Arduino micro-processor to individually control the lights on top of my homemade communication tower. I wrote the code to make the lights flash out my wife’s name (as a test) in Morse code, which I then uploaded from my Mac to the board. All that, and I know what it means, too.

Here is a screen shot of the view I get from my surveillance tower, as well as some rapid oil sketches I’ve done of the view. The sketches are the exact same size (9 x 12 in.) as the small television monitor that I’m painting from.

Gene Schmidt is a New York based artist that I met last year at an International Arts Movement conference. I remember really enjoying his sculptures of irregular polygons fabricated from accumulations of rulers of various types. The rulers are cut to conform to the determined size of the object, rather than the object’s size being determined by a particular measurement. The ruler represents only its own shape, weight, width, and mass of material, no longer representing an abstract, external unit of measure.

[Auto Wheel and Rim, 9 x 6 in., 2007]

At that time Gene told me about a project he was working on called Manhattan Measure, that entailed laying red yardsticks (about 30,000 of them), end-to-end across the length and breadth of Manhattan. I’ve checked the website occasionally since then and saw recently that the project was finally completed (sans upcoming documentary).

[July 10, 2007, Central Park (photo Alicia Hansen)]

My affinity for snaking red lines aside, I just love the idea of hand measuring something of this scale. The obvious difference between this work and the works that I saw initially is that the rulers are actually being used for their capability to represent a unit of measurement. Initially there is something less appealing about this straight forward utilization of the ruler than the first works I saw, but Schmidt has taken the rulers and used them to create an object in his studio, essentially compressing the length and breadth of the city into a few cubic yards of space. I find this compelling when considering that we live in a world where actual spacial distance, as it relates to human action and interaction, has become a non-issue. Yet Schmidt’s project takes no shortcuts in spanning what is a great distance in relation to the human body, and the weight and mass of the final sculpture makes this difficult to ignore.

At the moment I’m simply referring to this latest piece as “the tower” but it will have a title soon enough. I’m really cranking on it because I can’t afford for it to eat up my entire semester, and with a piece of this scale, that’s pretty easy. I’ve made good progress, working on it during almost every unaccounted for waking moment. I’m really hoping, more than anything, to learn something from this that will spur an idea or set a trajectory for my thesis show/project. It is fun to finally be working with my space, rather than fighting against it.

“Dayton, what am I actually looking at?” Good question. The tower is made of steel. It’s 6 x 6 inches, and 25 1/2 feet high. The cross beam on top is 10 feet long. The tower is supported by 1/8″ steel guy-wires attached at the floor and at 15 feet on the tower. Mounted on the cross beam are three tower beacon lights, and four closed-circuit video cameras. None of the electronics is wired up yet.

tower from front entrance of the school

view through windows to front porch of school entrance

Matthew Fisher recently blogged on Chicago artist Jeni Spota (#2 of 52 artists in 2008), which brought her to my attention for the first time. She received her MFA in painting from the Art Institute last spring, but I don’t think our paths ever crossed, though we have a number of mutual friends. I saw her 12 x 12 show at the MCA this Saturday.

Her work is amazing, and there’s just no good way for words to make up for what’s lost in a photograph. The paintings are lush, voluminous, relief sculptures in oil paint. Spota’s generosity with paint is lavish, and the viewer is the benefactor of her philanthropy. They’re delicious (culinary metaphors just keep coming to mind)… I don’t often get excited about paintings.

[Giotto’s Dream (Pisa Pane verison), 2007, Oil on Canvas, 12 x 14 inches]

[Giotto’s Dream (Pisa Pane verison), detail]

The thing that seals the deal for me is the subject matter. Crucifixions abound. Madonnas, haloed saints, angels, and throngs of onlookers fill the canvases. Most surprising of all is the absence of any easy sign of cynicism, bitterness, or even casual dismissiveness that often accompanies Christian imagery in contemporary art. The paintings are quite straight-forward, even tenderly painted, and the absence of any obvious antagonism is what makes the work so ambiguously palatable. It leaves me wondering what the catch is. It must be there somewhere. Right? It is in the MCA, afterall… It’s unclear, and that’s what makes the work powerful and unique.

The main exhibition at the MCA right now is Gordon Matta-Clark. I just love the guy. The show is a really broad look at his work which was great to see. I saw his piece Bingo/Ninths (video here, sandwiched between two other works) in 2004 at David Zwirner gallery in New York, and was really impacted by it. The piece is a video of Matta-Clark (and crew) cutting nine rectangular sections from the side of a house in Niagara Falls an hour before it was demolished. The video is accompanied by the actual wall sections cut from the house. This type of work was all new to me at the time, but I’ve come to really love his works of architectural intervention.

[Gordon Matta-Clark, Wall sections from Bingo/Ninths]

There was something strange about seeing these particular objects again, in a completely different setting. It made me want to see the crates that these dissected wall sections travel in.

To wind it up, there’s also a show of Alexander Calder models for his mobiles, including a model for Ghost, which hangs in the Great Hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This brought to mind Tylenol heir and Philadelphia collector Hank McNeil. He named his daughter Calder, and she has a small Calder mobile (a real one, not the museum gift shop variety) hanging in her bedroom.

There’s also Mapping the Self, a show of artist “maps.” It draws on both blue chip artists and Chicago locals, including a couple of folks I know, making for an interesting show.

Oh, Brother…

Oak Park has an arts district that’s located two blocks from our house. It’s a community based endeavor that includes a few small galleries of the mid-level commercial, and arts and crafts variety (you know, the kind with names like “Art Gecko”). It’s not exactly my thing, but fantastic for what it is. It’s got the perfect independent coffee shop, boutique maternity clothing store, high-end thrift shop, mom and pop barber, yoga studio, and a few nice little restaurants.

And now it has new signs demarcating the little corridor on Harrison Street. I think the signs are a great way to establish the district, draw in more businesses and help it grow… There’s just one little annoying thing: they look a lot like gigantic, red, disposable razors.

These drawings don’t illustrate too well that the signs arch back at the top, finishing off the razor design. It is beyond me how designers, arts district coordinators, and community leaders can work on something like this, and no one notices in any meeting (or has the jewels to say it) that you’re about to pay $120,000 for something that looks an awful lot like a gigantic shaving tool. I can understand the community folks, but the guy who designed the thing? The artists? It reminds me of the first time I saw a Mexican guy in a sombrero on the front grill of a Toyota about 15 years ago.

(The fun part of this is that I have an idea brewing for some guerrilla art in the form of a giant Barbasol can.)

Currently my studio is undergoing a transformation. I’m packing up, and emptying it. I’m erasing it. I’m stamping around it. I’m looking for an advantage in the metamorphosis from my own very specific workshop to a generic graduate studio. It’s the difference between our houses, and Plato’s house. One is where we live, the other is where meaning lives. In some places space is a utility (galleries, for example). In other places, space is a metaphor (old prisons, for example). I’m looking to find the studio where meaning lives. Mine just happens to be the ideal studio to search for meaning, because what’s meaning without an audience?

I’ve been floundering in my fishbowl for a while now. I’m looked down upon daily while cutting, hammering, gluing and making a terrific mess of my artistic practice. The occasional passerby will condescend to knock on the glass. We wave and smile. I don’t mind, I just go back to my crafts. But just up the street at the Shedd Aquarium they mind. “Please don’t tap on the glass,” the signs say. But what if the fish began tapping on the glass? What if, rather than just going about their business, the fish assembled in a row along the glass, and stared back? What if I stare back? Well, there’s nothing like a thirty foot tower, a four camera video surveillance system, and a digital video projector for finding out.

More soon…

If I had thought about this ahead of time I could have made it really interesting.

Probably, about a year from now, I’m going to travel to Philadelphia to dismantle my Eastern State Penitentiary sculpture, and haul it off to sell it for scrap. This is the unfortunate necessity for the non commercially viable sculptor that I am: eventual destruction and disposal.

So it goes with my chopstick bridge. I’ve needed to do this for a while now. With the scale of the piece, the difficulty of transport, no storage space, and no takers, it had to go. It was the first project I did in grad school, it took a lot of time, and I liked it quite a bit, so it was kinda sad for me. I’m wondering if this is what it feels like to shoot a faithful injured horse that you’ve loved and ridden. I don’t know, but I had to grit my teeth to smash the thing, and it certainly wasn’t any fun. OK, maybe a little fun…

I’m gonna try to crank out a good run-down before Anna wakes up from her studio nap. Advising kicked off this week and I had great conversations with both of my advisers, Shane Campbell and David Raskin, both in the art history department at SAIC.

David taught my winter term art history class on Vito Acconci, and I was very impressed. He’s an expert on Donald Judd, and I’ve been influenced by Judd for all of the wrong reasons, so that ought to keep our conversation lively. He had some good thoughts and insights regarding my current project.

Shane is ABD for a PhD in Art History from Iowa, I believe, but more interestingly owns Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago. I met him last year at the Armory Show in NYC. He was the only Chicago gallery represented. He’s refreshingly irreverent, for an art historian, and that’s because he’s a gallerist first. He has encouraged his advisees to read Dave Hickey’s, Air Guitar, which I’d borrowed and read a couple of years ago, and which causes most of the respectable art historians at the Art Institute to cringe. Read the first chapter and you’ll know why. I’m also reading The Uncertain States of America Reader, a publication spawned by the exhibition from which it takes its title, curated at Bard College a couple of years ago. I’ve only read the first short essay, but it’s a spot-on, if somewhat clumsily written, account of what it’s like to be an art mover. It explains a bit about why I was eventually fired - only you have to also insert the character of the evil stepmother from Cinderella as my boss, give her a mustache, and describe all of her dialogue in profane, gravelly, guttural outbursts. And her pumpkin is a home-made race car.

Shane’s gallery has two locations. One in Chicago, and one in Oak Park, on Harvey Avenue. If Harvey Avenue doesn’t ring a bell to you: that’s the street we live on, several blocks south of the gallery. It’s not just any gallery, though. It is a part (shares space with, sorta) of the Suburban, a independent artists’/project space started by Chicago artists Michelle Grabner and her husband Brad Killiam after they moved to Oak Park. You must go to the website and read the history of the space. It’s really fascinating, and an amazing place to discover right down your average suburban street.

I’m enjoying going to art openings weekly. They are rapidly becoming less nerve-wracking. For those that have never been to an opening, the reason they can be nerve-wracking is that they are usually crowded, loud, and they are often lousy for seeing the art. In the past I would just pick the openings that I thought were interesting, or was invited to by a friend. But the last month I’ve been to probably fifteen openings and have been running into the same folks a bit, which makes it enjoyable. I’ve also started to realize that, unless I become famous, my work will never undergo the same relentless scrutiny that it has for the last year-and-a-half. You learn this by looking at the art that people make that gets shown in galleries, and knowing exactly how it would be dismantled at your school. I hope to always make good work and receive healthy criticism, but it’s still a comforting thought.

I saw a lot of work this month and it ran the gamut from really interesting, to forgettable. I had my own opening, and I’d give my work in that an okay. By far the most interesting opening was Clive Barker at Packer-Schopf. Clive Barker is probably best known as the author of the novel Hellraiser, and for his writing and directing the movie of the same name.

[Clive Barker Liar Oil on Canvas, 24 x 24 inches]

Well, the book/film has a cult following - a horror cult following - and I spent my first thirty-minutes at the opening wondering whether Barker was aware of how utterly boring his paintings were, when surrounded by his fans. On any other day the paintings might have been more arresting (although they still looked like board-book material compared to an average Odd Nerdrum), but that night they played second fiddle to the freaky, freaky fans. It took me a while to figure out who he was, but he turned out to be pretty normal looking guy.

Downstairs was work by Ron Bell. I enjoyed the work for its craft and complexity and meaningless machinery, but it ultimately felt like a side-show to the circus upstairs. I’d be interested to see a couple of these works in a large, open space, rather than a dramatically lit, white cube dungeon. They work perfectly in the dungeon, and that’s the problem, it seems.

[Ron Bell]

The show I was in was a group show at Gallery 2, one of the Art Institute’s exhibition spaces. I made two new pieces for the show, neither of which am I enthralled with. I don’t hate them either.

[Cargo, 2008, wood, digital video, monitor, peephole]

[For the Love of Guns, 2008, MDF, rhinestones]

The real highlights of the show for me were works by Tom Gokey and Daniel Lavitt. Tom graduated from the department last year and Daniel is a first year sculpture MFA.

[Tom Gokey]

Tom’s work stole the show for me. Tom’s a gimmick guy, but his gimmicks are always so good that I immediately forget whatever might be bad about gimmicks. As elegant as these four grey-green hand-made paper panels are, they are equally as ignorable in the midst of a sculpture show. It’s this type of aesthetic understatement that acts as a foil to the medium, as the paper is made from $49,000 in shredded US currency. In fact, it’s made from the exact amount of Tom’s tuition at the Art Institute, acquired from Uncle Sam, who constantly shreds cash, apparently. It reminded me of Tom Friedman’s work in which he places a microscopic ball of his own feces on a pedestal. Very understated. Very invisible. Very loud. Crap in public just is, tiny or not, and so is money, reconstituted or not.

[Daniel Lavitt]

I don’t have a detail shot of Daniel’s bronze cast McDonald’s cheeseburger, but it’s really nice, resting in its styrofoam nest. It reminds me of my own unapologetic affinity for McDonald’s burgers and begs the same question really: “How could something so bad, be so good?”

Finally, I’ll mention a group sculpture show at Kavi Gupta Gallery. The work that caught my eye immediately was a skeletal chandelier by Tony Tasset. I’m currently becoming interested in making skulls, and I recently discovered that Tasset lives in Oak Park.

[Tony Tasset, Capuchine Chandelier, 2006)

The work is well done, but not remarkable if you’ve, A) ever imagined what the production designers for Goonies could do with a chandelier while napping, or, B) seen any of Adam Wallacavage’s octopus chandeliers. However, I’m still thinking about making some skulls, so I was interested.

[Adam Wallacavage, Venus in Furs, 2006]

finis