St John- Day 2

Well, we're coming to the end of our first full day in St. John. It's gone by so quickly. We arrived yesterday afternoon and stayed in a bit of a dump for the night but we checked into our villa today. Below are some pictures of the view.
























































It's an amazing place and as you can see it has an amazing view! We also have a hot tub and a pool. There are some banana trees and a lime tree as well, unfortunately the fruit isn't ripe enough to eat just yet. I guess we'll have to get our fruit from the grocery this week.


















After breakfast this morning, doing the paper work for a rental jeep, and checking into our villa we decided it was finally time to hit the beach for some snorkeling! We drove past one of our favorite beaches, Hawksnest, but the parking lot was full so we decided to try another favorite, Denis Beach. Denis requires a ten minute hike to get to but it's very likely that once you get there you'll have the beach to yourself. There are plenty of shady and sunny spots depending on your mood and the snorkeling is great.

We arrived at our pristine slice of paradise but the wind and waves were too strong. We had never seen the beaches in St. John with this strong of a current. Determined to not let it stop us we grabbed our gear and headed for the water. The shore was much rockier than I remember but I knew it was difficult if not impossible to walk into the water with fins on. So with bare feet and fins in hand I tried to walk into the water over the sharp rocks and bits of coral littering the shallows. I got about knee deep when a wave came an knocked me down. I dropped my fins, one of which fell behind me and the other in its unbridled enthusiasm decided to go swimming without me.

I helplessly watched it drifting further and further from shore. Kristin had her fins on and said "I'll go get it for you" and went in after it. My hero! She quickly recovered it and began swimming around holding on to my fin. She began to motion for me to come out to meet her but I wasn't able to get out there, especially without my fin. I couldn't understand why she wasn't bring the fin back, she was just snorkeling around holding my fin hostage, knowing full well I was dying to get into the water. Temptress! Jezebelle! Why doth thou taunt me thusly?

I called out to her, "Just throw me my fin!" She was swimming about ten feet from shore. "What is she doing", I thought? Slowly she came closer and eventually reaching the shore, was forcibly rolled over the rocks by a powerful wave. "Help me!", she cried. I ran to help her stand and get out of the water. It turns out that she wasn't peacefully swimming as it looked but was actually trying to avoid being thrown into the coral and rocks. She was really shaken up and scared. The waves were even more powerful than they at first had seemed.

We took off our gear and eventually found a small patch in the water that didn't have that many rocks but it was only about a foot deep. We played around in our little kiddie pool for a while but snorkeling wasn't in the cards for today. Even being in such a shallow spot we were being tossed around as if in a washing machine. One wave caused the back of my hand to brush against a piece of coral or a rock drawing blood. It wasn't much of an injury, it almost looked like one of my cats scratched me but that was enough. We sat in the sand reading while drying off a bit and then we gathered our belongings to make the hike back to the car.

We were disappointed to not have the opportunity to see some marine life but were happy to just be here. When we left yesterday morning there was an inch of snow in Rochester and now, here in St. John, it is beautiful, sunny and eighty-five degrees. We went back to the villa and took a swim in the pool. All in all, a great day.

Don't worry fishies, we'll be back for you tomorrow.

24 Short Pieces number 7

Honey, what happened to my Michael Bolton CD?

Back in 2001 the Whitney Museum mounted a show called Bitstreams that, as you may well imagine, exhibited artwork that was created using some form of digital means. One of the works in the show that has stuck in my mind all these years later, (Well, among several others such as Brian Conley's War! Serbia vs. United States) was a sound piece by the San Francisco collective DISC (I don't know if they are active anymore). The premise for their work was that there are too many compact disks in the world already so they would create their work using existing ones. They would purchase classical and pop cds from bargain bins and then alter the surface of the disk using tape, markers, lubricants, etc. When played back the disk would be a chaotic collage of squeaks, squeals and pops, the original recording completely destroyed. Surprisingly, it was actually quite interesting to listen to, full of elaborate textures and rhythms. (As a side note, some of the most beautiful "music" I have ever heard is when I close my eyes and listen to the clacks, chirps and squelches sitting on a moving Subway car in NYC, a full quadrophonic orchestral symphony, created in real time, and each time unique. Try it sometime!)
This strategy has links with Marcel Duchamp, Musique Concrete, and Abstract Expressionism but updated for the 21st century. This also is connected to work of my own such as the 24 Short Pieces series. In some ways I'm thinking about the glitch, the breakdown of image, the rupture of language, the role of the individual in the age of the digital, and how these issues influence contemporary culture. We've all seen the corrupted JPEGs online that result in colorful abstract mosaic patterns. These accidents are interesting to me, but in my own work I don't want the accident to be the end result, but rather an element in the process. I need to bring my hand into the work, to formulate a structure. The frays at the ends are where things get interesting but at the end of the day we need somewhere to plant our feet.

Help! I can't breathe!

I love painting. In particular, abstract painting. Everything from Piet Mondrian through Franz Kline through Joan Mitchell through Jacqueline Humphries. Be that as it may, more often than not when I've seen a show that has really knocked me out, it has been a sculpture show.

In 1996, during my weekly rounds to the NYC art galleries I walked into the Gagosian Gallery in SoHO. There were a series of steel cubes approximately five feet tall arranged in the gallery space. After a few minutes I began to experience this crushing sense of melancholy and began to have a difficult time breathing. These cubes had such an immense visual weight they began to suffocate me. I knew that the experience I was having was completely illogical but I was powerless to overcome it. After leaving the gallery I had to view several more shows before I was able to return to normal. To this day I don't understand what happened, but I do know that the experience I had was very real and very powerful. It sounds absurd that someone could be affected this way by a bunch a steel cubes but it happened.

I've seen dozens of Serra's sculptures since that and they've never had anything near the impact as that afternoon in the mid-nineties. The arcs he's been doing recently leave me cold. They do some weird perceptual stuff when you're walking through them but they seem more theatrical than sculptural. It's not surprising that these big tilted arcs mess with your equilibrium, but how about being blown away by big metal cubes?

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/soho-1996-10-richard-serra/

24 Short Pieces number 2

This is the second animation that I created for the 24 Short Pieces series.

Offf part deux

The second day at Offf offered up some great inspirational surprises. Gmunk and Motion Theory were great but I would like to focus this entry on Shiftspace, Dr. Leonard Shlain and Amit Pitaru.

Shiftspace is a collective that emerged from NYU's Media Research lab. They are developing an open source tool that allows users to create comments, links and switch images on top of existing web pages. This very interesting idea is an attempt to make a true public space on the web. One of the members of Shiftspace explained that since all web pages are owned by someone they only give the illusion of being a public space, much like the courtyard of a shopping mall which seems like a public space but in fact is not one at all. If you try to engage in some activity that is not approved of in this space you'll quickly see how private it is as the security force escorts you out of the building. This software layer, the Shiftspace program, becomes a truly public space that anyone can interact with and no one owns. Wiki to the extreme perhaps?

Dr. Leonard Shlain made a compelling argument tracing the parallels from the world of art to breakthroughs in the science of physics. A simple example of Shlain's thesis is comparing Einstein's theory of relativity to the cubist works of Picasso and George Braque. The disintegration of one point perspective is the visual equivalent of Einstein's theories. Check out his book, Art and Physics, I plan to.

Amit Pitaru creates custom software that can be used for a variety of applications. One of his works was an interactive musical tool. In another he revamped the video game Tetris to make it accessible to individuals with physical disabilities using a variety of different input devices. It was quite touching to hear him speak about people he worked such as those who could only move one finger or had to manipulate the input devices with their nose because they have no use of their extremities. Often this simple gesture of making these games accessible had a profound impact on the physical therapy of the subjects. Technology in the service of humanity, how great is that?

I have a couple of students who are attending Offf as well. I hope they are as inspired and reinvigorated as I am. This has been a great experience and it's been great to be back in NYC. There will always be a big part of me that considers this place home.

Offf

I'm attending the Offf Festival this weekend which describes its theme as post-digital creation culture. Offf is a seven year old conference that originated in Barcelona and this year is being held for the first time in NYC. Some highlights so far have been the designers Paula Scher and Hillman Curtis.

Scher gave an insightful talk tracing her history from the mid-sixties all the way to her current work, large scale politically charged paintings of maps. She began by describing how the sixties influenced her world view. Her interest in hand drawn type evolved in reaction to the Vietnam War. She explained that in her view, Helvetica, being the typeface of choice for many corporate logotypes, was seen as the enemy. It was symbol of those that were responsible for sending young people to die in a foreign land. She posed the interesting question of how the current administration's policies and actions might affect the work we create today.

Hillman Curtis, a self described "commercial artist" chose to focus on one of his non-commercial web films entitled Embrace. He said he needed to make these films to feed the artist part of himself. The commercial feeds his belly, the art feeds his soul. Yeah, I relate. We can do both.

Another really interesting presentation was a group from Barcelona, who created a new interactive musical instrument dubbed Reactable. This new instrument has been generating quite a buzz (no pun intended) lately, so much so that the musician Bjork purchased one for her current tour. Do a search on youtube. They performed a couple of musical compositions that a led a couple of audience members around me to remark that it was too "advant-garde". I loved it. I love popular music as much as the next person but I am also down with pure cacophonous noise. John Cage or Autechre? Yeah, count me in.

It's inspiring to be around these really creative people. I look forward to the next couple of days.

I also had the good fortune to briefly see a friend of mine, Greg Herman, who currently works at the design firm Digital Kitchen. He showed me some of the work he has been doing over the last couple of months and I was completely blown away. Greg is a great guy and ridiculously talented and driven. It is inspiring to see someone who works eighteen hour days just for the love of what he is doing. I need to get back to work.

Hey, don't touch that!

When I was around fifteen or sixteen my family briefly relocated to West Palm Beach Florida. I drew and painted fervently but my work was mostly comprised of bad landscapes and copies of photographs of my guitar heroes. Every weekend I would watch Bob Ross and Bill Alexander on PBS bust out their half hour paintings and I thought that was what art was. No doubt I was aware of people like Picasso and Van Gogh but they were far off my radar.

One day my mother, knowing that I had an interest in "art", decided that we should go check out the local art museum. Upon entering the lobby of the museum we were confronted with a black wall that had white lines drawn in different patterns laid out in a grid. I didn't really know what to make of this and I wasn't even sure if this was the "art" part yet. I found out years later that this piece was by the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt, an artist I came to admire greatly.

Leaving the lobby to enter the main galleries of the museum we were presented with a diverse body of work ranging from Clifford Still, Frank Stella and Alfred Jensen, again, I didn't really get to know who these people were until much later. For an impressionable teen who knew nothing of the art world, this was a new and exciting experience. This wasn't art that I necessarily understood but I could see it was different than what I was accustomed to and it spoke to me in a way that "happy little trees" didn't.

After walking around a bit I noticed this green metal box with a plexiglass top sitting in the middle of the floor. I walked up to it and placed my hands on top in order to bend over to see what was inside. The guard immediately came over and said, "Please don't touch the artwork!" What? There's not even anything in this box! What artwork are you talking about? Startled and embarrassed I carefully backed away from this perplexing object.

I've loved Donald Judd's work ever since.

After leaving the museum, I took the pamphlet home with me and kept it in the top drawer of my dresser for a long time. I remember taking it out to look at it from time to time. I remember being especially drawn to a Clifford Still reproduced in it. Most teenage boys keep dirty magazines in the dresser drawers, I kept museum literature.

Years later I found a rusty piece of metal that measured about a half inch tall and deep and around seven inches long. I proclaimed that it was a sculpture and dubbed it mini-minimalism. In my mind I traced it from Duchamp, being a found object, through minimalist work such as Judd and Carl Andre since it was a rather anonymous looking piece of industrial waste. When I would explain that this was a piece of sculpture my friends laughed thinking it was a joke but I liked the idea of being able to carry around an object in your backpack that you could take out any time to have an aesthetic experience with. Sure, it was a bit tongue in cheek but I was serious. I like the idea of an artwork that can be manufactured cheaply and is of a scale that is consumable by the mass public, even though a majority wouldn't care.

Often times when I see art in the galleries in NYC (or anywhere for that matter) that really moves me, it saddens me that I will never see it again because it will be absorbed into the collection of some wealthy collector and never seen by the public again. This is why I plan to share some of the work files for my motion pieces, I want people who are interested but may not necessary have the monetary means to collect art to have a chance to "own" a piece of art.

24 Short Pieces

When I was in graduate school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn I used to frequent the library to browse the art books. I found a catalog of a suite of drawings done by the painter Cy Twombly entitled 24 Short Pieces. The drawings looked like exactly that, various scribbles and paint smears, what my wife jokingly refers to as "chicken scratch". Even though the drawings seemed as though they were done in a few seconds they still held up, individually and as a set. For years I've been wanting to do some sort of riff on this idea, and finally that day has come.

I've done abstract paintings for years, and I've also done computer animation and design as a means of supporting myself. I love doing both but for a long time I resisted combining the two. I had a rather old fashioned Greenbergian view of abstraction as being a pure, autonomous object. Years ago I was having a conversation with the painter David Reed and I told him that I was taking some computer graphics classes at Pratt, but I was trying to keep that from influencing my paintings. He rightly said, "Oh, don't do that!" The point being, the more outside influences that enter the work, the better and more interesting it will be. I tried to infuse that spirit in my work ever since.

I decided that I wanted to take my interest in animation, computer animation in particular, and mix it with my interest in abstract painting. I decided to create a series of twenty four, three second abstract animations loosely based on the suite of Cy Twombly drawings. Although the pieces are very time consuming to produce I wanted them to feel as direct and inevitable as a pencil scrawl done by Twombly. Ideally, once complete, the pieces could be shown in a gallery context but I also want to make at least some of them available for viewing on this blog. In the spirit of open source, in the future I plan to also post the After Effects and/or Maya source files for anyone to download and learn from. So without further ado, here's the first post from 24 Short Pieces.

I tried to upload video but the conversion process that happened on the software side of the blog made the resulting image quality unacceptable to me. So instead I uploaded an animated Gif file. Click on the image and the animation will load, a low tech option, but I like the idea of using an out of date technology to display my work. It may stutter the first time through but once it loads it should loop at a decent speed. Enjoy.