a “lightning talk” mini-lecture I gave last week

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@willmeiertext
a “lightning talk” mini-lecture I gave last week
Molly Bounds: Human Kind
via One Good Eye
When I came in to Molly Bounds’ studio at RedLine, she was working on a comic for a new local publication dealing with ideas of alternative art education, a topic with deep origins for her. Her parents studied art and wound up as so many art students do, completely resentful of the path they took, and were less than excited about their daughter doing the same. It wasn’t surprising to learn that Molly had a combative relationship with her college professors, rejecting their narrow academic mindset. When she was told not to do something in black-and-white, for example, her response would be, no, fuck you, watch.
Molly spends a lot of time trying to create work that doesn’t have her name attached to it. So sometime in the past couple years, when people started becoming really interested in the pop color schemes she had been developing, she instantly switched to a subtle, quiet palette. A main tangent of her work has become an investigation into what sort of power she could give those colors, but that agenda could change at any time. This defiant flexibility is why she doesn’t have or want gallery representation.
Despite her efforts, though, when I see a Molly Bounds piece, I instantly recognize it. There’s usually this powerfully feminine content, there are characteristic color combinations, sure, but the real signature is this stylized, abstracted flatness with the crystal-clear efficiency of a Lichtenstein.
This flatness comes from her background as a printmaker. After working in a high-profile commercial print shop for awhile out of college, where editions would get scrapped for a single speck of imperfection, one day she looked at her work and couldn’t help but wonder if it had become ‘commercial’. Gross.
The aesthetics of imperfection were always something she had tried to hone, and she suddenly found herself needing to find a way back to the human hand, which was all but lacking in her native medium. On the side of her printmaking practice, Molly had long been doing murals, and it was the larger scale of these and the looser gesture of the brush that drew her to her current painting practice.
She recalls seeing a David Hockney at SFMOMA, walking up to this monumental painting and noticing these pencil lines, made with the same blue drafting lead as she uses. In that line: the essence of how the thing was started, honesty about that process, an immediate moment of self-realization – you came from the same thread as a master. Coincidentally, my ‘pencil-line’ moment was at a Lichtenstein retro in Chicago. But with the Hockney or the Lichtenstein, those paintings aren’t about those pencil lines, yet they still somehow make the painting their special level of special.
What is it that’s so implacably special about imperfections in art? Is it different to land on imperfections by accident than to seek out their subtle aesthetic? What allows that to work (when it does)? Something contextual about the greater meaning of painting, or art? Or something… You can go deep here, because these are tricky questions, because in a lot of ways their outcome is a fork in the road that leads to either the best or the worst, the most courageous or the laziest, moments in paintings.
In work that is supposed to be so tight and slick and tricky that it belies its creation and it’s about its own craftsmanship, but where the artist let a tape line bleed and maybe they didn’t think someone would notice – that’s the worst shit ever. But what we’re talking about here isn’t that – it’s when maybe like some outlines are cruder than others, whatever – and those elements are embraced as natural parts of a process, incorporated into a stylistic aesthetic. Maybe it’s just an alignment of subjective preferences between Molly and I that make these moments so special, but one of my favorite contemporary painters has long been Neo Rauch, and that’s pretty much the essence of his work, those collisions where something started to stop working and he just left it and moved on to the next moment. It’s this honesty, like, okay, I didn’t really mean to do that but now it’s there. It’s admitting imperfection without the shame of trying to cover it. It’s the majority of what I’m referencing if I was to use the term ‘painterly’.
The human element, in this case, embracing vulnerabilities, is characteristic of Molly’s work on many levels. Almost all of her work depicts human figures, and almost all of those figures appear to be grappling with something vaguely familiar to us. There’s an interesting sort of honesty here, where true stories of real people are highly abstracted to their most basic representation. This is where the reductive flatness allows their messages to ring so clearly.
Molly’s reference point here comes from comics. In her personal favorite, Optic Nerve, the story at its core is about an insecure teen girl who passes out at a party and endures an embarrassment no one will let her forget about. It’s interesting to consider how frame cells would be chosen in something like this when there are so few moments of action to pace. As a painter dealing with similar themes and styles, Molly frequently escapes the constraint of having the single frame of a canvas by incorporating her mural work into painting series, hopping outside the picture plane so that the entire room is being read. It’s painting as installation, or vice versa, supposed to be read like a comic you inhabit yourself.
But it isn’t just a coy reference to comics, it’s core to her philosophy about art. It’s the painting version of a zine, of a performance piece: you have to be there to get it. Which isn’t about exclusivity, it’s about a real-life presence. Making sure the art is really there with you in space and time and can’t fully be detached from that context. She wouldn’t recreate the mural in a collector’s house, same as the collector couldn’t keep Yoko Ono in a cage cutting hair.
Molly thinks a lot about performance art. She’s really interested in choreography of the body, particularly using the body in space to enact disruption, like in a protest. Her work is admittedly not very disruptive, but she’s looking to try to enact the same sort of agency within people, a way of finding a voice, finding common ground with others you might’ve assumed you have nothing in common with.
But on the other hand, her works are sort of disruptive to the flow of everyday life, in the same way that meditation is. They’re still and contemplative, and you can reside in their humbly non-intellectual states. The goal is unlocking this quiet thing within ourselves that isn’t even directly translatable to words. And that’s where the earlier conversation about abstracting emotive content is really significant, because emotions are about as abstract as abstract gets. For a by-all-accounts representational painter, dealing successfully and unambiguously with that content is pretty cool.
Will Photography Survive Its Art-Historical Karma?
via One Good Eye (Denver)
“I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself,’ by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images.” – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980
Month of Photography is just about over, and again, it was a great set of shows, with a diverse array of aesthetics and concepts. But going around and looking at these shows, I can’t help but skew every single one of them with this train of thought, which was at the forefront of my mind even during the last MoP. What I’m talking about is this funny notion that like, what photography did to painting oh-so-many years ago, it’s now suffering itself next to the infinite scrollability of the internet, and as a fine-art discipline is now sort of scampering in painting’s footsteps, conceptually.
Okay, so what do I mean, exactly?
I remember a few years ago suddenly realizing, with everyone talking about how ISIS was using Instagram as their new principal recruitment vehicle, that this was the same Instagram that was in my pocket. Sure enough, a few copy-pasted arabic hashtags (who knows) later, and I was seeing the frontlines of the mythic War On Terror through the eyes of the enemy. Graphic Stuff. Not something many people would want to see, and yes, I definitely worried about the NSA liking my Facebook statuses in the future, but just pause and think about what I’m getting at here. If you can have an experience that shockingly unique on Instagram, an experience also by most accounts not-at-all-Art, where does that leave Photography, the medium of imagery, in its fine-art gallery context? Where does it find meaning anymore?
Without diving too deep into a conversation that is largely played out, this is just so obvious an echo to me of the art-historic birth of the photograph (among other technological revolutions) planting the modernist seeds of conceptual art in painting. Like, ‘okay, well, if we can’t just be images anymore, what can we be?’ Self-reference begets itself.
Today, it’s likewise the case that photographs in a gallery rarely seem to hold up merely by the merit of their imagery. Some do, sure. But as a whole, how much of the representative body of MoP 2017 were ‘just photos’, vs. how much seemed to raise the question of the taxonomical boundaries of Photography? Coincidence?
It’s interesting because much of the best work that was ‘purely photographic’ seemed to reference its own flatness (see: the sort of iconic moment of painting’s departure from photography, denying the illusionistic depth of the picture plane and calling attention to itself as an object). Take, for example, Michael Borek’s really wonderful series in the entry alcove of Redline’s Between the Medium, in which various immediately identifiable landmarks suddenly ‘freeze’ flat as you notice that they’re just photos of photos of the landmarks, applied as vinyl to the sides of buses or some other sort of metal industrially-paneled surfaces. These defining, contrasty fissures in the images’ surfaces carve their own space up like a Mondrian, referencing the perpendicular edges of the picture plane. The fact that multiple images wind up in a single frame in this body of work only further adds to the feeling that these things are really about themselves being viewed.
Even further down the line of the ‘Expanded Field’ trajectory of painterly dialogue, another really exceptional body of work belongs to George Perez at Alto’s Denver Collage Club group show. Stacks of home photos with their centers carved out, like tunnels through remembrance of a vacation or something, are curled from being wrapped tightly in rubber bands. They become objects, almost. At least more than they would simply as a stack of images, which would read as a presentation strategy more than a state of being. The tension in their form, though, sort of snaps you out of viewing their content, and all you can pay attention to is the density of them together, in the room. There’s something very real and here-and-now that happens from this – it’s what Rauschenberg was seeking, on a humble scale.
This ‘in the room’ feeling seems to be one of the most prevalent trends for Month of Photography shows this year, in one way or another. At Leon’s Skins, Tya Alisa Anthony sheds the frames from her images, letting the prints ripple in the air conditioning, the texture of the images breathing the same air as us, getting us all the closer to the skin of her models, the face-value subject of the show.
A similar sort of relationship-to-the-body occurs in the best pieces at CVA’s Presence: Reflections on the Middle East, a series in which the ornately decorated windshields and interiors of various public transit buses fill the frame, life-sized, allowing us to sort of sit directly in front of these things, contemplating them as stand-in portraits of who might be driving them. You feel empathy for the ghost of the driver purely for the sake that you could almost step in there. Tableau-vivants.
I mean, I’ll admit, I’m definitely putting a spin on all of this, framing all this work this way. I’m biased, I’m a painter. But let’s take a step back from the as-painting conversation, and talk about MCA’s Ryan McGinley retro. Here is an utterly ‘just photo’ show, and what’s more, it’s totally the kind of thing that you would see on the internet. But where the show is interesting is that it’s there in physical space with you. It’s the fact that an art museum is willing to put blowjobs, pissing, coke-sniffing, and projectile-vomiting on their walls, larger than life. The difference between a computer screen and an art museum was really driven home here when a circa-eight-year-old girl ran ahead of her parents into the porniest room of the exhibition as I was leaving.
The most successful show this past month, in my opinion, was David B Smith’s Penelope Umbrico solo, because it really brought all of the things I’ve mentioned together in a dialogue that felt very nuanced and high-level. At first glance, it’s certainly the most painterly show, with large, manipulated images in various forms of prints and frames, repetitiously referencing fluorescence in various ways. As well as themselves, rather explicitly. But from the serial, tiled arrangements, even overlapping, of the photos, to the most resonant moments – rows of polaroids of lens flares and fireworks, hung just high enough so that the track lighting reflects into your eyes, the show is about the entire thing together, there, in the room. Which is why the way that these polaroids, sparklingly activated by their surroundings, are so much more interesting than the superficially similar arrangement of McGinley’s at MCA. When I asked a gallery attendant if Umbrico always made photography, I got the response that photography was her subject, not necessarily her medium. Nice.
Plenty of these shows had politically or otherwise relevant content, but let’s face it, none of them really dug into anything in a way more significant than what you’d get from a few seconds of googling their themes on your phone. There’s plenty to say about various work that was successful that I didn’t touch on, as well, sure. But at the end of the day, the only work that really felt like it was alive and thriving and not just there because it’s the biennial was the work that was aware of itself. Maybe aware of its own mortality. Which is where I go back to my original point — that the ‘aura’, the ineffable thing that was supposedly the last stand of painting in the face of photography, may be all that photography has left to set its fine-art status aside from the unending stream of images we see every day.
“Even the most perfect reproduction … is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” –Walter Benjamin, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936
Dmitri Obergfell: Death of the Cool
via One Good Eye (Denver)
INTRO:
This is the first of a series of experimental writings about, and in collaboration with, select Denver artists. Having no specific agenda other than an interest in these artists’ work, the plan is to have a conversation with them in their studio about whatever happens to come up. There’s no Q&A, no topics to necessarily cover, and honestly, if there’s one thing I want from these experiments, it’s for them to feel different than your typical artist interview. A conversation that is true to the work and the personalities of the artists and myself.
I hope to document the personality of the conversation itself. So keeping the process organic beyond their studio and back into my own, the writing produced will inherit the thematic trajectory of the dialogue directly, with my role as writer being to subsume both peoples’ viewpoints, conclusions, questions, answers, misdirections, etc., into a single, weirdly tangential perspective.
DMITRI OBERGFELL: THE DEATH OF THE COOL
Dmitri Obergfell’s process fills the entire main space of Leisure Gallery, his current studio, in preparation for his show, Man is a Bubble and Time Is a Place, opening at Gildar Gallery March 23. Rap music from Macbook speakers echoes around our conversation. The entire time I was in there, he never paused from making molds. I started in at the natural place: What’s this show about?
Basically, it’s a meditation on “Deep Time” — an idea sampled from 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book), in which one of the most defining moments was the first time a proto-human got bored. Thus began the search for meaning, leading to the creation of symbols, the original “victory over time” that allowed information to be passed to future generations. But this sounds romantic, which isn’t the point. Dmitri is mainly just curious about what might possibly in the future be considered an artifact representative of our current era of massive overproduction.
Really, though, think about what this might be in our current, pop culture-obsessed world. The commodity of what we might call Cool? It’s certainly what’s being produced in rap and pop music, and just about every other corner of cultural industry other than art (as artists would love you to think — but really, their Cool is a commodity too, just more codified).
This has always resonated in Obergfell’s art for me, even at surface value, reflected in the chameleon paint signature to his style. The “flip paint,” as it’s sometimes known, which changes color under varying light conditions, embodies the theme of change and originally came from his fascination with car modification culture, where people have this eerily invested relationship with objects. Weirdly similar to Egyptian funerary art — some of the most extraordinary artworks ever produced, with express intent to be immediately put in the ground. I’ve personally felt for most of my life that the purpose of capital-A-Art is easiest to grasp in a sarcophagus. And I know it isn’t just Obergfell and myself who are on this wavelength: it was one of the most beautiful themes in Matthew Barney’s largely grueling film-opera, River of Fundament, screened in town as an arrival present from DAM curator Becky Hart not too long ago.
But really, for the majority of history, most art arguably had to do with some spiritual notion of death, all the way up until it made a departure from Christianity and began a slow descent into a sort of crisis as it began to become increasingly about only itself. Some might even say that modernism was a result of art becoming aware of its own mortality, with abstraction and minimalism and postmodern schools of self-referentiality becoming obsessively anxious about their encroaching deaths.
That’s a bit pessimistic, though, which is a sort of inapplicable frame for pieces like Dmitri’s recent installation featured in DAM’s Mi Tierra, which reads as not only profoundly Cool, in its chrome-plated, flip-painted, nails-did, speaker-boxed, narco-saint-swearing, tequila-shot-taking visual vocabulary, but also heartfelt, detail-oriented, and really very fresh and futuristic. Obergfell brings up Robert Smithson saying something like, “installation isn’t about filling up a room, it’s about taking things out.” This aside, though, perhaps one of the greatest strengths of this piece is that it isn’t art-about-art. It feels like it’s made for non-artists to enjoy — a product of the MTV / internet age, not just in its references, but in its attenuation to short attention spans with dozens of layered, individual moments for viewers to explore with reward at their leisure. To thumb through like the window shoppers we all are, until the museum revokes the public’s entry privileges because we can’t stop ourselves from doing so (true story).
The fact that Dmitri’s works can be understood and appreciated by both artists and those who know nothing about art cannot be emphasized enough. His artworks’ brand of Cool is that of common symbology, things cool to regular people, in some ways analogous to really exceptionally-produced radio-rap. There’s a persistent legibility, even if you don’t know the prerequisite slang (artSpeak) to understand everything being said. And this is really important to him, mainly because art is in a really dangerous place in our current political climate. Much of the public may come to (if they don’t already) view being an artist as some sort of con, and regardless of any individual cases of subjective truth to that effect, it’s a fact that art is at least threatened by more forms of recreation and entertainment than ever before, constantly competing for increasingly shorter attention spans.
It’s true, sadly. The magic that often lived in art — in Stonehenge, in representational painting, in philosophical minimalism — where is it now? Because mystery, wonder, and “how the hell?” often feel like they now belong to software. And while art has always progressed in tandem with technology, is it a given that, as just one of many incarnations of information, it’s exempt from an expiration date?
This all leads me to the place where I don’t think what might be an “average” perspective on art misses the point at all. If art has this anxiety about its own death, which it compensates for by incessantly semantically proving it’s existential value in this core way, perpetuated by an industry where accumulating generations of post-Duchampian, self-proclaimed Artists successively come-of-age wanting to believe that the fortune they spent on their art-school education was worthwhile — okay, it’s a big ‘if’, but if that’s true — it kinda makes sense that artists wouldn’t want to just make “some shit that’s cool”. But whether tastes are fabricated by capitalism or not, whether that matters or not, “some cool shit” is what anyone who isn’t plagued by these anxieties wants art to be. And even just within the context of a museum visit, focusing on anything in the 21st century is like speed-dating.
Art shouldn’t be superficial. It honestly probably isn’t even art if it doesn’t get deeper and better the longer you spend with it. But it should be gratifying and appreciative of its viewership now more than ever. In a political time when it could be said that people are increasingly scared of being challenged, in all areas of their lives, whether thanks to Facebook algorithms or just some greater zeitgeist, what I’m getting at is a dangerous line of thought, for sure. But I think taking seriously people’s willingness to engage information will only benefit the future of art’s wider efficacy, and maybe ensure it even has that future in the first place. It’s important to connect to the culture you’re a part of, not just simply detach from or criticize it. Then influence is possible. Enjoyment will always be capitalized upon. That doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted.
Returning to 2001 (the movie) — which anecdotally is my personal favorite work of art — no one understood this better than Stanley Kubrick. His movies are immaculately shot. Basically perfect. But if you really think about it, what he did was almost like what people now call “edutainment,” a sort of high-art sacrilege. And yet, there’s no doubt that the way he works with the “material” of film, using something shiny to draw people into his world of ideas, is tactically smart, to say the least. I personally don’t mind admitting that I love to be edutained.
I wanted to talk about Obergfell’s sculpture at BMOCA, Go Home Bacchus, which seemed much farther down the continuum toward “critical” art, and learned that I kinda missed the mark in my interpretation. It’s not institutional critique, it’s again, a meditation. On monuments. They’re everywhere — huge, politically charged objects made by bureaucracies to celebrate victory, a kind of weird idea in the post-9/11 world, you might think, but apparently these sorts of idealistic, fascist colossuses are still a major export of North Korea for dictators worldwide. When New Orleans takes down their confederate monuments, as in current news, then how best to do that? Will they literally topple them? What an indulgent symbol…
And yet, for all this power these things are supposed to hold in the public spaces they reign over, its almost like the only way for people to react is to take a selfie in front of them, or else commit petty vandalism. It’s almost like instinctual in our culture, like it’s funny to vandalize a giant statue whether you care about the politics behind it or not.
Obergfell’s main piece of research for this project was the scene in Tim Burton’s Batman when Jack Nicholson’s Joker brings his gang in to supervillianize the art museum. “A really fucking cool scene,” representative of popular culture. But then also around that time ISIS began making headlines for destroying vast amounts of historical artifacts — horrifically seeming to say “we’re erasing your history in its most prized form, it’s gone, we own you.” So it turns out there is power in the act…
But Bacchus is about graffiti, not aesthetic genocide. But maybe not even graffiti, because that word is loaded and this has nothing to do with geometric, gradient murals. So a more slippery concept — slippery to the extent that Obergfell *might* not even be upset if someone was to tag the piece. Something racist: no-go. Some self-important graffiti writer trying to claim the piece and “get up” — get out. Junior WestSideMafia alternative school student? Go for it. The person who keeps writing “Kill Trump” on electrical boxes around Denver, please. Do your thing (endorsement is mine, not necessarily the artist’s).
Not to get redundant, but there’s something really charmingly normal about the shit-headed vibe of these sentiments, likened by Dmitri to a teenager stealing fire extinguishers to blow at cars in the parking lot for fun. And while that’s so juvenile and condemnable by the ultra-ethical art world, I know – is it not also kind of the most raw manifestation of The Artist’s Instinct, if such a thing exists? To just say “fuck it I’m gonna do this thing and see what happens”.
Why? “I just thought it’d be cool.”
new things to come
not going to give away any secrets, but there’s some exciting stuff on the horizon for my art-writing
*-)
Behind the Fourth Wall: My Experience as a Museum Worker
It’s a unique experience, art-handling – being a “preparator” (which autocorrect thinks isn’t real). Like with any manual labor, it’s rad to get paid to work out. But obviously, there’s much more to it than that. You touch the untouchable things, you have keys to rooms many will never know exist full of objects to be seen by sometimes even fewer (I mean, the amount of pictures on my computer I wanted to include in this post and just...couldn’t...for whatever reason...it’s more than just a couple), and you live behind the fourth wall that is the magic of the completed exhibition. You built the wall. And in a way, it’s like there’s some of yourself sealed in there.
There’s a sort of trivial glory in it, but also a kind of hilarious demystification, a rapid desensitization to the wondrous. And a lot of the most menial labor you could possibly imagine. Dozens and dozens of hours of out-of-body audiobooking while waxing-on/off. I haven’t been doing it long enough to become jaded yet, but I know very few career preparators it hasn’t happened to. But really, would I be writing this if I didn’t think it was awesome?
I’ve had a lot of people over the years ask me how I came to do work like this, so I want to give that question a bit of attention:
I had an internship and then a job at a gallery in college, the H&R Block Artspace – which was run by a really brilliant director and showed world-class art, but mostly entailed sitting at a desk and socializing with visitors. But toward its end, I met some real-live art-handlers who chuckled with sympathy when I tried to get on with them. That small private company very shortly after, however, got the contract for several years of building traveling exhibits from New York’s American Museum of Natural History at a brand new nature and science museum outside Kansas City. And they needed a big team all of a sudden, and gave me a call. So I started out building dinosaurs.
There’s a very ad-hoc feeling to that sort of context. You need this thing to fit with that thing and if you’re tool-savvy enough, you make it happen. Sometimes it’s not pretty but if it’s safe to let the public walk under then it will work. It’s fun, or at least engaging – the small-scope part of the job which is just the constant problem-solving and spontaneous fabrication strategies.
But the bigger picture that fascinated me from the beginning about this kind of work was the collision of information and architecture. This is what will always carry over into my future pursuits: the question of, how do you best craft an architectural space, one inhabited momentarily by all varieties of people, the sole purpose of which is to educate each of those people about some element of culture in an engaging way?
I got my taste, but quickly realized that it’s incredibly hard to make a living in this career path. The nature of art-world work is that almost all positions are contract, meaning you need a minimum of probably 2-3 jobs at once to juggle in order to make it work, and still often there are dead periods where you are really panic-level strapped for cash. So I branched out quickly in as many relevant directions as I could, taking any skill-building entry-level job I could find. Some of the paths I took were fabrication-oriented: doing backend assembly of custom commercial cabinetry, then finish work on museum casework and artists’ sculptures. Some were art-handling: private transport and storage, hanging galleries, assisting professional artists on installs, etc. There’s a resume on my website *eye roll*.
Every one of these jobs I gained through face-to-face ‘networking’, through someone I met at another gig. Meaning at the recommendation of friends. Most of them I worked with my best friend, also Will, who got me into the world of art museums. Team Will, shoutout.
I’ve in turn gotten more than a couple of people their first museum jobs. There’s nowhere I’ve seen where ‘who you know’ matters more.
That being said, not everyone is cut out for it. Most aren’t. I just happen to associate with generally exceptional people ^______^ . It takes an eye for a ridiculous level of detail, and a hand that can consistently perform tasks attuned to that detail without fucking anything up. Plus snap-judgment problem solving skills for often dangerous and/or costly predicaments. You also generally need to be a fun person, since the work can get quite tense (understatement for the 60hr/wk installs my team is used to) and it helps to be able to lighten things up.
It’s interesting how many different skillsets and attitudes intersect in this world. You have very blue-collar-flavored work surrounded by typically intellectual types of people. The stakes are high (put it in the back of your mind that just about every individual object around you is worth more than you might ever make in your life, accumulated) so people are very serious, especially around art, and while there’s a special level of hero-ness in actually touching The Stuff, it can tend to involve less creativity, for good reason. I was a Lego kid, so the construction and space-creation side of the job was always a little more engaging for me, personally.
So I really lucked out to land where I’m at today at the Denver Art Museum. My current job is basically to assist in the construction, fabrication, assembly, and finishing of everything that exists between the empty room and the art. It’s called “Exhibitions Production”, and at DAM, what a ‘production’ it is. We do really high-dollar build-outs designed to be theatrically jaw-dropping to the public. At standards of craft that I’ve never seen anywhere else as ‘standard’ – think 1/16″ margins on nearly everything. Which, combined with the irregularly angled Liebeskind building we do most of our work in, makes my job pretty complicated. Which keeps me out of trouble, which is nice.
So back to how the hell I landed in such a good one:
In order to secure this job (they’re extremely coveted and basically impossible to get without personal invitation), I had to work as a guard, a ‘gallery host’, for half a year. I told my hiring managers in that interview that I only wanted the job to meet the art-handlers who I would be working for in the future. It was interesting to take a step back from the behind-the-scenes world I was used to and be basically at ground-level with the visitors, an underling of the museum social hierarchy who exists as a mediator of rules. By interesting I mean almost totally shitty, with the exception of a much slower-paced experience of observing many, many people engaging the same exhibits day after day. I had always worked to put the shows on, but by the time that is over with you are sick of the show and already on to the next thing anyways. Catharsis. This was sort of the opposite – like a Groundhog Day of visitors forever wiping their oily foreheads all over the fourth wall. Incident Report.
But it offered an opportunity to see both sides of the idea of ‘the exhibition’. The before and after. To watch people’s patterns of real-live interaction with shows that clearly had intricate thought put into specifically the visitor-engagement / education elements of their designs.
And it also worked: it gave me the opportunity to see someone pushing a cart full of tools, whose boss’s email I got from him, who I proceeded to harass frequently over the next half a year until he finally agreed to give me a trial run.
Since my promotion to the Exhibitions department, moving on to work with the designers and administrators in charge of those experiences I mentioned – that has been so fulfilling. It’s been the best job I’ve ever had, but beyond just enjoyable day-to-day-ness, it planted the seed that has grown into my biggest fascination now, which is the idea of the future of the museum experience.
“Museum Experience Design” – the museum in the digital age. Information architecture meets architecture. Rather than didactics for a universal audience, a modal, entirely custom veil of educational opportunity tailored to each visitor... That kind of thing. That’s where I’m headed. But that’s an entirely different topic.
For now I just feel super lucky to be on such a ridiculously talented team at a big, well-funded museum that puts on such extravagant shows. There’s a lot to observe, and a lot to learn.
I guess the moral of the story, if there is one, is that if you really want to get into this kind of work, you need to be talented, i.e. probably an artist (no, not a conceptual artist), but mainly you need to put yourself out there and meet the people who can hire you. And be relentless in trying to get them to do it. There aren’t a lot of these jobs but they’re worth trying to get.
If you land one, just make sure you don’t drop anything, then have fun.
on workspace: extension of the brain
So I’m currently taking some classes from the Interaction Design Foundation on Design Thinking, and a lesson today was talking about physical creative space. Which is something I have talked several times at length about with my buddy Eden, fellow life-artist and the owner of Five Points Pizza. On a handout for a craftsmanship workshop Eden led, the very first point was: 1) MASTERY OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT (Production): “Production ultimately defines the product.” I couldn’t agree more.
The studio space for me, and I would say for all artists, is so important to take seriously. As a freshman in college, my first teacher frequently would make us clean up our entire workflow, rearrange tables, find new neighbors, and take out different supplies. I went on to study Painting, the major lucky enough to offer the most personal real estate for the tuition (many people joked that’s why you choose the department). As a senior, for my first project I built a two-story loft-style studio within, up, out of my cubicle – a fort, I called it – and made art about forts in it all year.
After graduating, I attempted renovate my leaky, freezing KC garage before deciding, fuck all that, but was luckily shortly after granted an excessive office-style studio space for writing in downtown KC through the Charlotte Street Foundation.
Then I had the opposite of a studio for about half a year and traveled cross-country on a motorcycle, worked on a farm without electricity or warm water in California, and couch-surfed while working various museum jobs. No personal space whatsoever. But lots of time to think.
But life brought me to Denver for a steady job, and here we arrive at what I really wanted to write about. I moved March of 2015 into a one-bedroom low-income apartment with the intent of living in it like a studio apartment with an art studio attached. Over the last two years, I’ve rearranged the dynamic of this space probably a half dozen times, and luckily for this occasion, documented most of the iterations. Here’s what it looked like when I first moved in, all starry eyed:
I basically had some furniture, and I fit it all in as sensibly as I could. Rough draft. All of the flat tabletop space was great, because as I got my practice rolling again, I was working on dozens of handheld-size oil/glass sculptures and needed lots of room to spread out the assembly process. Ultimately, the walls were really under-used and I got rid of the large table, which was a good move because suddenly life shit happened and I found myself needing a roommate to cover rent.
This was the most challenging point in making the studio space work, obviously, because I had two rooms worth of shit I needed to make fit in one. But with the help of Sketchup and Vyvanse, I made a plan:
And it worked.
It was super crucial to me to preserve a division between live- and work-space. Even though I had just one room I spent pretty much all my time in, I had psychological boundaries indicated physically, like with the canvas on the floor, that reminded me, this space is for working.
And it did actually work, because as my workspace changed out of necessity, my workflow followed suit. I made a series of smallish wall-hung paintings on glass, all about the size of the surfaces I had to work on, extending from what I had been learning from the previous studio mode. The rapid switching of gears spatially meant I had to really grasp on to some conceptual material somehow, which led me to make a few mindmaps, which ultimately turned into that series of paintings.
But luckily the situation wasn’t permanent, and just as my process was starting to outgrow its small container, the roommate moved and I had my bedroom back. Differently this time.
Immediately the work began to change. An old college painting came down off the kitchen wall to be painted over, more than twice the size of the largest piece I had been working on out in my living room. And soon another 2x3′ canvas followed, and the smaller series of works began to stack up. I inherited some trapezoidal pedestals from work, and those found their way in there too for a short time. They’re clunky as all hell, so that was short-lived. They make nice end-tables.
And the more I painted, the more wall space was necessary.
And then this happened.
And then this. Those are each about 5x6′, which doesn’t seem huge until you put them in a bedroom.
Shit. All of a sudden I was a painter again, I guess, after a long time of being too art-schooled-out to accept such a thing. And the entire studio needed to change to accommodate that role.
As I painted more and more, I realized that my other future-minded tech pursuits (don’t worry about that here) were only a distraction to have in the same space. And I needed more walls. So another shift.
Maximum wall space in the studio for painting, with shelving available for the smaller painting-sculptures to still be possible, with palette and shelving on casters to make for a modular configuration. I even took the door off the hinges. I took this photo today:
All this left my live-space looking like:
You can see the two finished ~2x3′ pieces I was mentioning on the right. One of them is on my website.
The main room is split between a more personal/social back area and a still separate workspace for digital/non-messy creative pursuits.
Like this here.
I wonder if I would’ve even written this had I not moved my computer out here...
I thought maybe I would have some more overarching truths about *the workspace as a physical brain* to offer, but maybe all that is just contingent on your personal whole deal. Maybe the moral of the story is to be aware of the way your studio space influences your work and vice-versa. I’ll defer to Eden for the zen wisdom:
PRODUCTION ULTIMATELY DEFINES THE PRODUCT
If nothing else, this should be a nice little intimate glimpse into my process.
Rambly, but hey. Getting back in the flow. <3
long time no see
Hi there internet,
It’s been a long couple of years full of changes and growth and etc. Yadada yada.
One of the revelations that’s come to me, clearly, is that long-form essay-type writing (for free) is not a sustainable part of my creative practice, at least as of now. But the absence of writing from my practice entirely aside from personal journaling has left a void. What a conundrum...
So from here on, I’m going to try to keep a more frequently updated series of sort of informal blog posts about various things I’ve been thinking about. They might relate to my visual studio practice, or to thoughts that have been lingering around more persistently. Who knows. But the words need to start flowing again.
See you soon,
Will
Star Wars Wars: a Contemporary Cubist Masterpiece
Been awhile since there was something that I really wanted to write about, but for this one I couldn’t resist...
Star Wars Wars: a Contemporary Cubist Masterpiece
-----division-----
all of the writing below this post was done as part of the 2013-2014 Charlotte Street Foundation Urban Culture Project Studio Writing Residency Program.
PIX
Thanks to everyone who came out to the solo show of my 'Paintings' series at the Writers Place on August First Fridays! Had a really great time with the ~75 people who came through. If you missed it, Writers Place hrs are something like 11-3 weekdays and the show will be up through most of September.
The official statement for work in the show below:
Here are some shots of new work in my UCP studio:
installation:
more:
Moebius Strip (Bad at Sports)
A little late posting this, but great news:
I was asked to contribute an article for February to the Chicago-based art blog, Bad at Sports, giving an idea of what is going on in the Kansas City art scene currently. My contribution takes six shows, all from January 2014, and discusses how they form a conceptual Moebius strip of the "correlation between pictures of things and picturesque things."
This is the first time my writing has been featured in a major, non-KC publication, so I'm extremely excited. Check it out!
Fictional Futures: Scott Dickson's We Are Not This Body at PLUG Projects
Fictional Futures: Scott Dickson’s We Are Not This Body at PLUG Projects
read this: a story of waveform nested tapestries and hallucinatory seizures
a review of Miki Baird's solo show, read this, at Haw Contemporary.
what working out a complicated thought looks like for me in-progress...
mindmap of a movie review I've been sitting on for awhile for 2013 Sundance film, Escape from Tomorrow
View of Orange (Split) from Ocean Park
View of Orange (Split) from Ocean Park
a pseudo-review / critical thought-experiment concerning Marcie Miller Gross's work on view at Haw Contemporary through the end of 2013