Thursday's Lecture

Wall Drawing Number 1

Photobucket Album

Wall work

My studio here at SCAD has a wall that is about 22 feet long.  It is great inside the studio and I have plenty of room to work.  The wall on the outside of the studio is blank, painted with the ubiquitous gloss white paint that I guess art schools everywhere use.  I am confronted by this wall (what I guess Melville would call the "whiteness of the whale") each time I go into my studio.  I felt like it was confronting me to do something with it.  In his essay "Whitescapes" in his book, Chromophobia, the artist David Batchelor talks about a kind of whiteness that is accusatory.  This has been on my mind as I pass this wall.

I've decided to use this wall as a site for drawing.

I am going to make some drawing installations on this wall, short-term projects of a week or so. My goal here is to expand my practice to include works that are specific to a location and have a limited means of execution.  I also want them to have as their main focus the formal essentials of two dimensional art.  I am not interested in making sculpture, but rather I am interested in the consequence of a mark on a surface, the evidence of the tool being used, and the duration of a mark in relation to a body.

Miwon Kwon's lecture on Felix Gonzales-Torres has really stayed with me.  Specifically the way Felix's work comes into being based on the certificates of authenticity and how the transmission of the certificate allows for the manifestation of the work.  Since these wall drawings are specific to the wall outside of my studio, it might be necessary to document them in writing in addition to photographing them.  I am not certain if these drawings can be done anywhere, but if someone wants me to recreate one how do I do it? Can I make the flexibility of location a part of the work?  Do I have to be there to install it?  All of those questions that Dr. Kwon posed in her lecture interest me a great deal.  

New Work...

I have been thinking a lot and drawing a lot this past few days.  The thing that has occupied me for a while has been this idea of ecstasy.  Bernini addresses it in his sculpture of St. Theresa, but I have been wondering about it in my own work.

At this stage of my life, I am barely a Christian.  I do have a long personal history as a Catholic so I do have access to ideas and models of trasformation, the miraculous and so forth.  I can call to mind many stories of the lives of the saints, for example.  But in my practice these have not been helpful in determining aesthetic frameworks for this project. 

I remember seeing a movie when I was a kid about the Rapture.  Essentially, this kid and his mom had a fight and she sent him to the store.  While he is there, the Rapture happens, when the faithful are taken bodily from the earth.  There is a terrifying, slow motion bottle of milk falling and smashing on the floor.  The holder had been "raptured" and there was only a pile of clothes where she had stood.  The kid rushes home and finds a pile of clothes in the kitchen where his mom used to be. Needless to say, this scared the shit out of me.  

I have been thinking a lot about that while in Savannah.  The possibility of being taken away in religious ecstasy.  Can that happen now?  What does it look like?  And really, since I am gay and an abomination in a cosmology that contains the Rapture, I know I will be "left behind." Who gets to go?  Who has to stay?  And since the sinners create the opportunities for the saints, is there a way that I am helping the faithful get to Heaven?  What sort of service can I provide for the faithful?  Similar to the service gay men provided to people of faith like Ted Haggard. (FYI if you see the movie Jesus Camp, there is a scene of Pastor Ted exhorting the children to hate gays.  It's edifying.)

As I keep making these drawings it is becoming clearer to me. 

Texts

For those of you interested, here are the texts I am using for my Visiting Artist Seminar Classes.  Many of them can be found in the MassArt Library, and also the articles are available on the JSTOR database.

REQUIRED TEXTS
James Elkins WHAT PAINTING IS
Mira Schor WET: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture
David Batchelor CHROMOPHOBIA

REQUIRED ESSAYS

W.E.B. DuBois "Of Our Spiritual Strivings"  from THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
Cornell West "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" from OUT THERE: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures
Walter Benjamin THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
Susan Buck-Morss AESTHETICS AND ANAESTHETICS: Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered
Sol LeWitt SENTENCES ON CONCEPTUAL ART & PARAGRAPHS ON CONCEPTUAL ART

RECOMMENDED
Gerhard Richter ATLAS
Charlotte Mullins PAINTING PEOPLE: Figure Painting Today
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz THEORIES AND DOCUMENTS OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Agnes Martin WRITINGS
VITAMIN P: New Perspectives in Painting
VITAMIN D: New Perspectives in Drawing

Meeting people....

I've met a lot of people this week. I really think I may have met too many people. I am really exhausted.

The first week of classes is over and it was really great. I have 2 fine cohorts of students and they are really excited about getting to work. The rosters and working with the Registrar has been difficult, but I am hoping the sailing is a lot smoother here on out.

The high point of the week, besides the teaching, setting up my studio, and meeting Hung Liu, an amazing artist from China, was the Visiting Artist Lecture from Steven Yazzie. I met Steven at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture when he was a Participant in 2006. The work he created there became a large scale, multi-media project called Drawing and Driving. He showed this work and all it its various permutations and also showed work he is making with a collaborative of artists called Postcommodity. It was a really far reaching presentation and he talked very generously about his practice and how he allows his work to grow out of itself. He is a very exciting artist to keep an eye on.

After Steven's lecture, we went to dinner at a restaurant called local11ten, where all the the food on the menu was locally grown. It made me think of Sarah Beth, she would have loved to see a fine dining establishment that was committed to the local environment and area growers. Plus the food was amazing. Steven, and I got to talk and I also got to speak at length with the amazing Hung Liu. Her show is at SCAD right now and there was a very large speaking event for her the same night as Steven's. I wish that I could have heard her speak as well. Since she grew up in Communist China and I grew up in a leftist family, we had a great time singing old party songs and talking about Paul Robeson. Her exhibition at SCAD is called Memorial Grounds. You can see images of her work at her website.

We also had a sort of pep rally/faculty meeting this morning for the entire faculty. SCAD is essentially staffed by adjuncts at the Savannah campus, so this means that there are a huge number of people teaching here, just like MassArt. At this all faculty meeting, we had a speaker named Peggy Maki, an Education Consultant and Assessment Editor who talked to us about how to assess students and how to figure out how they are doing in class. I have to tell you, I was so glad that I knew about the Studio Habits of Mind because everything this woman was saying was an affront to what I know about making and teaching art. She was so focused on rhetoric and rubrics that she lost sight of what and how one learns in the making. It was so results oriented that she never saw what artists learn from error or mistakes. Lastly, it was so concerned with metric evaluation that it did not move the student from problem solving to problem creating. You can bet that as soon as the presentation was over, I gave her my card with the name of Lois's book on the back. I have to order another copy of the book from Amazon. I gave my copy away.

Settling in...

Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying "One should avoid talking overmuch about the weather." I tend to agree. I have to say though that my arrival in Savannah was the coldest day of the year here. It was cute to see all the people bundled up in their parkas and scarves on a 39 degree day. I walked around in a sweater and jeans and just laughed my head off.

I don't know what you have heard, but Savannah is a breathtakingly beautiful place. The apocryphal story is that Sherman was so overcome with the city's beauty that he decided not to burn it. The truth is that by the time Sherman got to Savannah, there was no reason to destroy it. That - plus an aggressive restoration movement - accounts for the richness of architecture here.

There is a gothic sensibility to the place that fuels rumors that it is haunted. I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe in the sheer weight of history and this place really has it. I walked by the Savannah Cotton Exchange building and noticed that there were plaques everywhere about what person had done what where. There was even a plaque commemorating the invention of the cotton gin. But there was no plaque indicating that Africans and African-Americans were sold as chattels on that spot. Now there is a river walk, bars and restaurants, little shops and all that kind of stuff in the area, but if you look, you can see the brick staging areas where auctions were held for everything from pecan pralines to people.

The longer I stay here the more these incongruities will be revealed. I am hoping that they are influencing what I am doing here, just as I hope I have some lasting affect on the people I meet and teach.