San Francisco Open Studios is a 5 weekend (this weekend of the 27th and 28th is the third) extravaganza of visual art. It is a chance for the visual artists of San Francisco to plant a flag in the ground and let everyone know we are still here and still making art.
The standard belief is that gentrification, tech money, city regulations, greedy landlords and a host of other things have driven all the artists from San Francisco. They have all decamped to Oakland, Emeryville, Vacaville, Los Angeles or, according to one local scribe, Columbus Ohio. Well, not all of us are gone. In face of the previously mentioned reasons and many others we have, for love of the city, ties to family and friends, ties to work and colleagues and sheer downright stubbornness, there are still a boatload of artists living and working within our 49 square miles.
Open Studios lets everyone know that we are still here. Over 450 artists are participating throughout the 5 areas of the city that each weekend represents. Each of those artists is a proxy for many more who do not participate but still do the long, lonely, highly rewarding slog of making art. In our little complex, there are 7 artists participating but there are a least a dozen other artists in the buildings who couldn't make it this time. The same is true throughout the city. We are still here and still creating and the work is worth seeing. There may not be the numbers in the city that there were in the past, but artists are a hardy lot.
On the one hand this is a plea to come on out over these weekends and see some art, hell every artist wants an audience. You don't have to buy anything, just take a look at what is here. On the other hand this is a statement that art making is important to the fabric of a city and to the fabric of the soul. Regardless of the difficulties, we will strive to be here and keep creating. We will carve out places to work and the time to do it. Someday, it might no longer be possible to keep an arts community within the city, but for now, we are all still here. Come on out and see the work, encourage any artists that you know and let's try, amid all the problems we face in this city, to keep artists here, to keep on working. The flag is still planted now, but may not be forever.
It’s the day before my wife Claudia and I start to install the neon crop circle for Neon Robot Iceberg. I have all the glass racked up and ready to move and all the other materials and tools accounted for, assembled and ready to load. Now all there is to do is wait and worry until we get to work.
Even after many years of doing this, there is always anxiety before installing or delivering art. It can range from the low level “is the car going to break down on the way to the gallery” sort up to “is the piece going to work/perform as designed when it’s finally assembled” level. Currently the anxiety is between these two but adds a few extra degrees due to being neon.
The most obvious is shown in the photo above. It is a 4′ x 8′ (1.25 x 2.5 meter) wooden rack with 45 neon tubes wired to it. This represents about 90% of the glass necessary to build the circle. It has to be hand carried to the truck, driven to the site, removed from the truck and placed somewhere in the venue where no one will accidentally break the glass. In past years, I have dropped neon, fallen down while carrying it and occasionally ran into something with the rack. All of these things are possible and tend to wreak a bit of havoc with the glass.
Driving a truckload of neon across a city with streets whose maintenance runs from poor (near my studio) to fair on the main thoroughfares to excellent in all the areas I won’t be driving tomorrow is nerve wracking in the best of circumstances. Hearing the unique ping of a breaking neon tube while driving lets you know that the piece you conceived may not be the one you end up actually installing.
The photo above shows the transformers (7), high-voltage wire (250 ft.), tube supports (gray bin, 125), and the tubs of connectors, extension cords, tools, etc. that will make all the glass glow and form the strange and (I hope) wonderful construction that will be the crop circle. Most of this stuff is anxiety free, save for the fear that a transformer craps out during the show, but making sure that you remember to bring everything you need creates anxiety of its own. There is nothing quite like realizing you don’t have the tool or part you need and there may not be time to get it, to throw a damper on the whole experience.
So, everything is in its place, and all that is needed now is for everything to be right with the world. At least for the portion of the world that revolves around installing artwork. With any luck, I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
Neon is often considered a high-tech art form. In reality it has been around for a bit over 100 years. It is a fairly basic form of lighting technology.
A neon tube is hooked up to and conducts electricity from one pole of a transformer to the other. It behaves in much the same way as a piece of wire. The difference is that in a wire, the resistance to the electrons flowing through it is primarily given off as heat, with a bit of light (like a toaster); in a neon tube the resistance is given off as light with just a bit of heat.
You bend a glass tube into a form, pump out the air, fill it with inert gas (neon, argon, etc.), run some current through the tube and voila, you have the high tech art that is neon sculpture.
A neon crop circle is similarly a fairly basic construction. You use straight tubes and some curved tubes of varying diameters to create the form of a glyph that tickles a primitive portion of the brain into assigning meaning to it. That confluence of form and meaning can bring about feelings of wonder, meditation or just plain old joy in whomever experiences it. The act of walking through a construct that surrounds you with areas of colored light can act in strange and wonderful ways upon the brain.
Being that this particular crop circle is indoors, the tubes need to be a bit of a distance above the floor. This creates both a different visual experience and keeps them from being stepped on.
This requires making some supports out of plastic tubing and clips that will hold the tubes about 10 inches above the floor.
Like so.
With any luck, that will help the revelers at the event keep the piece intact through the evening. I will also be using some fully enclosed high voltage transformers to try to protect the viewers from any untoward interactions with 12,000 volts of electricity.
The transformer on the left will be fully encased when the top is attached. The one on the right is the old-school style with unprotected low and high voltage leads.
While I have no problem with art brut, I also like to protect the public from the potential hazards of low-tech, high tech art.
I went in to talk to Justin about the details of the project. His vision for the event is to have a bunch of art in the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason, some music, a few food trucks and some participation stuff just outside the Pavilion. The Festival Pavillion is a 120 by 500 foot clear span building on a pier jutting into San Francisco bay that was originally used to load troops and cargo onto ships going to the Pacific theatre during both World Wars. His idea is to have each piece of art in a pool of light in an otherwise dark building and then this large, bright neon glyph in the back. If it works, it will be distinctive and eerie.
I did a back of the envelope calculation of what it would cost to put it together. As I had most of the glass from the previous iterations of the project,
Red circle tubes.
Blue and Yellow tubes.
I made a rough estimate of the cost.
I calculated that I needed 3 new transformers, 2 rolls of high-voltage GTO wire, 100 plastic tube support clips, several pounds of new glass, some 3M VHB double stick tape and some gaffer tape so no one would trip over the cords. It seemed to work out to around $750 giving myself a bit of margin for error. Justin okayed the budget and we had a handshake deal.
Then reality bit me in the ass. My calculations were based on experiences and numbers that were over a decade old. It turned out that transformers and GTO wire had doubled in price and the other bits had edged up as well. The $750 would not even cover my complete costs. But, realizing that I could get by with 1 roll of GTO wire if I made no mistakes and that I could repurpose a few old transformers, I think I will be able to make it in under the wire. Sub-optimal, but when is that new for an art project. The lesson is, don’t rely on your memory for putting together an estimate, make sure your data is up-to-date.
I sure hope the artists get some free food and drinks at the event
Fort Mason in San Francisco is the first Military Base in the USA that was repurposed to be an art center some 40 Years ago. It became a model for other military bases thoughout the country that reverted to civilian control. In recent years Fort Mason drifted away from its mission as an arts center and became a bit of a facilities and exhibition space rental organization but a new director Rich Hillis, has begun to reorient the complex back to its original function as an arts center.
As part of this, they initiated the post of creative director and hired young gun Justin Hoover, formerly of the SomArts center and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art, to fill the post. He has begun an ambitious program of exhibitions, interventions, installations and events to bring the artistic pizzazz back to the Fort.
At the end of March, 2016 Fort Mason is kicking off Neon Robot Iceberg a video installation by Tra Bouscaren with a one day art event. They asked me to be part of it by reprising one of my Burning Man neon crop circles for the gig.
So the mysterious phenomenon of the crop circle will be reborn once again. I am going to install a version of Authorities Are Baffled in the Festival Pavillion at the Fort on March 25th. Being that it’s inside, it will be a combination of the original with some of the installation techniques of Partially Excavated Submerged Object, a large circle I did in the gallery of Hartwick College.
It should be an interesting journey to get this done in the 4 weeks time till the installation on Good Friday (for the Christians among you). I’ll try to chronicle the journey here in the upcoming days.
Most of the artists books that I make are done as limited editions. I used to determine the size of the edition by the number of pages in the book. If It was a three page book, it would be an addition of three; if it was a five page book, and edition of five; an eight page book an addition of eight, etc. Recently I've pick the size of the edition based on how many I would like to make. One of my earlier editions, "Imprisoned Words" was initially conceived as an edition of three. The piece is a fairly large book. It is 2 feet high by a foot and a half wide and about 8 inches thick. The covers consist of jail bars, and the spine is a large pipe to which the bars are attached. This makes it very heavy piece and, when combined with the illuminated pages, one that is physically very dominating.
The first copy was in a number of different exhibitions and gallery shows and eventually it was sold by my friend Donna Seager from her gallery. I had always intended to make the final two copies of the piece but other projects unfailingly seemed to intrude. It wasn't until very recently that Donna mentioned to me that she would like to use another copy of the piece and simultaneously another individual indicated to me that they might be interested in one as an addition to their collection. Suddenly there was a compelling reason to finish out the edition. The problem is that I can no longer find the notebook that has the actual drawings that show the size of the piece, how it's put together, the sizes of the various components, and all the other details needed to make additional copies. All there is are two photos and the measurements of the overall size of the piece from slide lists and that were printed on the slide mounts themselves back when we used color slides. There are also the CorelDRAW files that are used for the laser engraving of the text on the three pages of the book. These have to serve as the plans needed to reconstruct two additional copies of the piece within the next few months. The only good thing is that slides can be blown up to match the size of the piece to determine some sizes and then blown up further to try to figure out how the damn thing was put together.
Last week in order to get the ball rolling, I went across the street to Complete Fabrications a steel fabricating company and machine shop that did my original sets of jail bars. Interestingly enough, they did not remember having made them for me 10 years ago, who knew? By examining the photos and taking into accout that the piece itself is 23 x 18" and then judging the sizes of the various components it appears that the jail bars that form the covers should be 20 inches high by 16 inches wide. A few scraps in the studio led me to believe that 1 inch steel was used for the bars and quarter inch for the plates on the top and bottom of the set. Looking at the photo of the work and the rough drawings, they allowed as how they could knock off something like that fairly quickly and would get back to me a few days with a price quote. In the meantime they're building several giant sets of steel stairs for house remodels in San Francisco. Steel stairs being the latest architectural design meme that is sweeping through the San Francisco remodel market. They actually seemed to look forward to just doing a really quick small project instead of large complicated projects that are constantly being tweaked at the last minute by architects and homeowners.
From the CorelDRAW files show that the acrylic sheets that will serve as the pages are 16 inches high by 11 inches wide and cutting them to size and polishing the edges to prepare for the laser engraving has begun. The acrylic sheet pages fit into 1 inch diameter PVC tube which holds the LEDs that light the pages. The PVC can be painted to look very much like metal in conjunction with the jail bars and the spine pipe. The spine pipe appears to be 2 1/2 inch pipe which is readily available. After projecting the slides and viewing at large magnification the previous page mounting system (such as it was) I even figured out a better way to mount the pages on these copies.
Using LEDs to illuminate the pages instead of neon tubes as was used in the original will actually make the job easier in that I do not have to worry about glass tubes nor find a way to fit the transformer into the spine of the book. I can use one of the small wall transformers that are familiar to anyone with a laptop, printer or smartphone and just run the wires directly into the PVC tubes holding the pages. The other difference in using LEDs is that now it's possible to use more than one color within a page of text. Since each of the pages contains three pieces of text from different authors each can be illuminated a different color. In the initial piece a different color was used for each page and illuminated all the text pieces in the same color: red neon for one page, blue for another and yellow for the third. In these copies it might be possible to actually use all three colors within one page. Whether this actually increases the impact of the piece or instead makes it look a little too much like a circus will have to be tested. If it were a piece with whimsical subject matter this wouldn't be a problem, but this piece has some serious text pieces and reducing the effect with mulicolored pages is not the desired result. The focus should be on the text and not on all the pretty colors in the pages.
Having figured out from the slides and the page files how to actually re-create the piece, it should be just a matter of actually moving forward in getting it done, assuming no other projects unfailingly intrude. But this should serve as an object lesson both to myself and anyone who might be reading this to always keep your drawings. Keep all the drawings about a piece of art from the quick thumbnails to the detailed drawings laying out the construction in one place. That way should you need to re-create, it repair it, or just revisit it for your own edification, you have the necessary documentation to answer your questions.
A week after attending the Alternative Press Expo I stopped by Art Silicon Valley/San Francisco. Talk about the complete opposite end of the art world spectrum. While the APE Expo was energetic and hot with lots of buzz, packed attendance, people vary animatedly talking about their art work, their craft work, what they were trying to do, what they hoped would happen; the Art Silicon Valley Expo was very cool. Beautifully laid out booths, beautifully turned out booth attendants, people very cool and controlled except when they sensed a potential buyer. Then it was all flurry of attention, may I help you, we have some more here in the back; all geared towards separating the new generation of potential young collectors in the tech world from some of that money they've been piling up from their stock options. They even had panels such as "How to collect like a pro" designed to inform the newbies to the world of art collecting how to go about building that new collection. What the panels were mainly focused on was convincing the young collectors that they needed the galleries, critics, and curators of the established art world to tell them what to collect and how to build a collection of "investment grade" art. (the reality of what is truly investment grade art: that is truly rare work by artists with long established - read centuries old - pedigrees, is not the message they were going to be imparting at a show of modern and contemporary work).
The actual art displayed at the show was a bit of a pleasant surprise. There were only a few galleries who devoted their space to trotting out all of the old reliables of modern and contemporary art. You had a John Chamberlain crushed car here and a Frank Stella wall piece there, a bit of Basquiat and some of the early modernists-Miro, Chagall, etc. There was not as much as you might think given there wasn't a lot of room for risk taking. The smallest booth space was $13,500 plus a mandatory $1500 publicity fee contribution. Even the local galleries that were showing work were the on the hook for something close to 20 grand to have a 20 x 15' space to hang a few paintings and put a few pieces on pedestals. The booth rentals went rapidly north from there topping out at $50,000 for the very large spaces. It certainly goes to show both how lucrative the upper-level art world is for both the galleries and artists and what's at stake for those same galleries unless they can siphon off some of the money from the nouveau riche. There's only so much old money willing to buy somewhat risky (from the investment perspective) artwork. The old money likes old established reliable artwork which can be counted on to retain value and thus serve its role as both cultural ornament and preserver of wealth. New money, some of it raised on the very forms of art and illustration that were exemplified at the Alternative Press Expo needs to be convinced both that the artwork these galleries are peddling is worth the amount of money they're being asked to pay and that in the long run it will have the cultural cachet and wealth preserving qualities that the galleries curators and critics contend it will. Unfortunately, only time will tell if that's the case.
In the meantime the hustle and bustle go on. The attendance looked to be pretty good (at least right up till the ball game started - the myth that the culturati are not sports fans is just that, a myth). There were a fair number of young techies decked out in their quite expensively casual clothes which certainly was exactly the hope of the producers and the galleries involved. The galleries were trying hard to include artists that had some technological component or bent to their work. There were a number of artists using video projection, a number using lighted and/or backlighted drawings and paintings and several using neon (though of course that particular technology just ticked over its 100th birthday making it a curious hybrid of technological and old-school at the same time.) I certainly hope for the artists' sake that sales were brisk but it's unclear in the short-term whether or not the established collectible art world is going to be able to enfold this young tech money into their very established - though certainly garbed in hip designer outfits - world.
Given the culture in which we live there will always be a marketplace trying to connect artists with patrons and collectors. It will be curious to see how much the world represented by the artists and designers who populate the Alternative Press Expo and the maker movement will modify the traditional, straightforward, middle-person dominated art collectors scene. It will be interesting to see it play out.
Finishing Up Editions - or - how your best ideas really get old...
I was in my studio two days ago working on finishing up an edition of one of my pieces and I was reminded of the freedom you have when making one-offs. Generally I make all of my artist book pieces as editions much the same way that folks making paper-based artist books usually produce an edition of a certain number of individual copies. The reason is that the work and cost involved in designing and actually manufacturing the book cannot be reasonably recouped by only making and selling one copy. Most of us are not at the level of status and fame that allows for extremely high retail prices for our work. There is also the fact that artist books as an art genre, if you will, cannot find an audience or market if the price is too high.
Many years ago, I knew a glass artist with a fairly serious reputation. This person had a gallery in New York and a gallery in Washington DC and alternated solo shows between them every other year and could produce about 10 - 12 pieces for each exhibition. I was informed that the market for glass art (at the time) could only support prices up to about $5000 per piece (these were gallery pieces, not installations or giant Chilhuly-style works). This was for an artist in museum and private collections, cover person on American Craft magazine, teacher at an major art education institution.
The artist book market is similar. A very few superstars in the medium or major artists dipping their toes into artist books can charge high prices. The rest of us are going to be selling at a much lower price and thus, in most cases, need to sell editions for the effort to make any sense. No matter how much artists don't like to talk/think about the economics of making art (unless we're all together amongst ourselves and then you can't get us to stop) if you don't make some of the money back, you soon run out of the wherewithal to continue creating art.
So, there I am, in the studio, making the final two copies of the 20th Century Fossil Book (it was an edition of six). Sanding the edges of the acrylic pages with 220, then 400, then 600 grit sandpaper and finally buffing them with plastic polish; drilling the holes for the plug hinges; tapping in the hinges. Then soldering the LED strips together in the right order and cutting the aluminum channel they will sit in. Putting the VHB double stick tape on the acrylic; laying the LEDs in the channel; pushing the acrylic into the channel, and then gluing the limestone covers (previously cut to size - rather easily, though dustily, on a table saw with a carbide blade) to the first and last illuminated pages. All of which I have done 4 times before for the other copies and none of it exciting or really even all that interesting, but dammit you had better pay attention and do the job right or you discover that you have screwed it up and have to remake one component or another.
I mention this not to bemoan the work but rather to illustrate the difference with a one-off piece. Even though there is a lot of repetitive dull work in producing that kind of piece, you only do it once and then you are on to the next completely different piece. You don't have to consider whether an aesthetic decision you make is something that you can duplicate accurately or whether it makes sense to choose a particular material or component because you may not be able to get enough of them to complete a multiple edition. It's just bang it out and move on. Though to be fair the banging-out may take weeks or months or years depending on how cooperative the materials you have chosen are with the idea you have behind the piece.
So I am already looking back fondly on making the Cabinet of Prufrock even though it drove me crazy at the time with paint streaking, polyurethane not drying without brush marks, mahogany not staining well, discovering the drawers did not fit 3 days before it had to be shipped, etc. etc. etc. No matter what, it only had to be done once. Then I could see it, look at it, learn from it and move the f@#k on to something NEW!
The other weekend I went to the Alternative Press Expo (APE) in San Francisco. Wow, what an amazing group of talented illustrators and artists. There were something over 150 individuals, small companies, publishers, cooperatives and more exhibiting their work. From individuals doing posters and single sheet graphics to graphic novelists, comic book artists and a host of folks doing collectibles based on comics or just coming from their own creative juices.
For someone like myself who loves to make things in 3D but has never fallen in love with drawing for its own sake, it is always amazing to see what people who love to sit down with a pencil, pen, piece of charcoal, marker or whatever and a piece of paper can turn out. The stuff was dynamic, detailed, in many cases demonic (or Zombic(?)) and just wonderful to see.
The enthusiasm of the the folks exhibiting and attending was exhilarating as well. I was button-holed by a guy who shoved a magazine into my hand and said, "my kid brother wrote this graphic novel, isn't it great?" and it was pretty darn good. And it was one of many really beautifully drawn pieces of work. It was great fun and pretty darn humbling for someone like myself who uses drawings primarily as thumbnail sketches for sculptures so I don't forget the ideas, or as a method to work out construction details in pieces I am making. I can see why Robert Williams, one of the founders of Juxtapoz magazine always said that the unseen freight train that would one day overrun the fine art world was the world of the comic/graphic novel and illustration. The level of enthusiasm, energy, excitement and, yes, commerce happening at APE was something any international fine art fair would envy.
Luckily, my wife and I had visited the studio of artist Ronnie Goodman earlier in the day (another story worth pursuing as he is homeless, an ex-con, a marathoner, and an artist with a vivid and dynamic style). We had purchased T-shirts from him and, wearing mine at APE, I was showered with compliments on the Rad design. I may not be able to created great graphic art, but at least I can recognize it when I see it.
You can too. Check out any APE event you can find near you. The creative energy contact high alone makes it worth the visit.
I was forwarded a slightly panicky email this morning by the folks at Jotta asking whether I had indeed secured permission to use the Prufrock Poem in the Cabinet of J. Alfred Prufrock. It seems that the Times Literary Supplement blog had written about the Unbinding the Book portion of the London Art Book Fair and had mentioned The Cabinet
The piece remarked about my comments about not yet getting permission and moving forward anyway and concluded by stating that " Fortunately for Koloski, the estate has now approved his work." The Jotta/Blurb.com folks wondered if it were true and if I had proof of permission.
It was all news to me at 8:00 a.m. so I went to the email account I had been using to contact Faber and found this email:
Dear Vince,
My sincere apologies again for the delay on this one - I do, however, finally have some good news. The Estate are very happy for us to license the rights for your use of the work for a fee of £150 which would fully cover exhibiting the work.
Do let me know if you're happy for this to go ahead and we'll draw up the licence for you.
All best,
Emma
Yes, I was happy and replied asking them to go ahead and draw up the license.
It is clear that the Times had contacted Faber for the story and perhaps that served to move the process forward a bit more quickly. A few quick phone calls, a reply to the Times that indeed the estate did approve the use and then an email to the anxious artist letting him know that his efforts had not been in vain.
Whatever it takes is fine with me as I will soon have formal permission to use the poem and for an amount that is not going to break the budget. I will refrain from posting the vine of me dancing around my workspace after the good news and the perceptive words from Mr. Caines of the Times.
As to his suggestion that it might be appropriate to include the piece in any authorised celebration of Prufrock's 100th anniversary of debuting in print, count The Cabinet in.
As you can see, the folks at Jotta did a very nice job of knocking together a set of plinths for the piece and displaying it at the Unbinding the Book part of the Fair. Kudos to Ben James, Phil Serfaty and all the other folks who made it happen.
The day the "Cabinet" debuted at the Unbinding the Book portion of the London Art Book Fair, (26, September) I finally received a human email from Faber and Faber. This appeared as a response from my email of August 6th of this year and I have reproduced the string below.
Dear Vince,
Hope you're well and apologies for the delay in getting back to you with more information. Please could you let us know if you still require these rights and if you would to use the whole poem in this piece?
Very best,
Emma
Emma Cheshire
Permissions and Performance Rights Manager
Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House | 74-77 Great Russell Street | London | WC1B 3DA
I am a visual artist attempting to secure the right to use T. S. Eliot’s
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in a work of art entitled “The
Cabinet of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As your company represents the Eliot
estate, I have initiated a permissions request through the online system (P218414). Upon reflection I am unsure whether this rights request falls under the area of permissions or rights. I am contacting this address in hopes of learning both which process might be best, and what the status of the submitted request might be.
Unfortunately for me, I am operating under time constraints as the piece is intended, by the sponsor of the exhibition, to be exhibited at the London Art Book Fair at the end of September. Thus I am anxious to determine whether the right will be approved before shipping a work to London in September. I am continuing to work on the piece in the hope the request will be approved.
I have the greatest respect for the poem in question and believe my piece to be a tribute to the spirit of the poem. I have produced other works using permitted material in the past
(http://www.vincekoloski.com/alibrarybook.htm) and try my best to preserve the spirit of the materials included in the work.
Any information or assistance you could offer would be most appreciated.
Best personal regards,
Vince
Vince Koloski
Vince Koloski Studios LLC
My reply was "Yes and Yes" to Ms. Cheshire.
With any luck I will hear back before the next time the piece is exhibited or she could disappear like the cat's smile. It would be interesting to hear, one way or another, whether they are more likely to approve the use of Mr. Eliot's work in the context of art or cheese.
Unbinding the Book opened with the London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery on Thursday the 26th of September. They are getting lots of press and buzz (twitter feed: https://twitter.com/hashtag/unbindingthebook). I do not actually know if my piece made it into the show. It sat for over 2 weeks in customs, got to Jotta on Tuesday, they elected to take it to the gallery without unpacking it, for installation on Thursday morning. I don't know if it arrived okay, unpacked okay, set up okay or is working okay. A bit frustrating, but I am trusting that things worked out for the opening. We will know more soon, I hope.
It has now been 11 weeks since I submitted my correct request for permission to use the Prufrock poem to the Eliot Estate through Faber & Faber, their representatives/gatekeepers. The most recent email resulted in yet another automated "don't call us, we'll call you" response.
I would have thought the Guardian article would have triggered some sort of automated system that alerts them to possible unauthorized use of their material but so far, no contact. I don't know if that's good or bad in the long run, but it might be reassuring to hear something one way or another. Maybe I can contact the Cheese people who signed the recent marketing deal with the estate. Perhaps I could piggy-back with them by doing a campaign where they cut cheese on the top of the Cabinet. Perhaps a "Prufrock Preferred" brand of Stilton...
On another front, the piece is currently sitting in customs at Stansted Airport outside of London (as an aside, one Google reviewer called it the "worst airport in Europe" among a plethora of negative comments). I hope it has arrived okay as until it gets unpacked, set up and illuminated, I am still in a bit of an anxious state.
So, as Jimmy Cliff would say (sing) "Sitting here in Limbo..."
Alison Flood wrote a nice piece about Unbinding the Book for the Guardian in which she mentioned my work. The article contained a link to this blog which allows me to complete the loop by linking to the article. A couple of the other projects were described and they sound very cool indeed. A book that turns black as you read it and another that creates a radio circuit were both written up.
Down in the comments section below the article, a comment left by "opticus" contained this: "...it is so important that we know that these people are artists otherwise we might mistake them for some kind of nutter." Personally I'm charmed that someone has taken the time to determine that my mental health might be a bit dodgy, but it also raised the question in my mind of how long has it been that artists have been considered nutters.
I think that performing artists have been considered to be on the fringe for a very long time. "Show people" has been a perjorative in English for decades and looking back through history references to performing artists as shady characters or people of low reputation has been going on for centuries, if not thousands of years. Visual artists on the other hand did not seem to have that same level of negative connotation attached to them. They were either in the service of religion or the ruling classes and once the middle classes began to arise they became, as they have ever been, the playthings of the rich.
For hundreds and thousands of years visual artists either produced decorative works or sought to produce work that reproduced in some way visual reality. Sculpture pretty much had mastered realism by the time of the Romans. Painting took a bit longer until the introduction of realistic perspective allowed painters to depict reality in a manner that appeared accurate to the eye. By the 1830s or so, the visual arts had reached a level where the accurate depiction of reality was a commonplace. Then began the photographic era and by the late 19th century much of what painters and illustrators had done for a very long time was possible to be produced by mechanical means.
The Impressionists and Post Impressionists began to push against the boundaries of direct reproduction and were often greeted with derision by the general public. By the time the 20th century began and distortion and abstraction began to creep in to painting and sculpture the artist began to be viewed a bit differently. They were no longer the decorators, portraitists, landscape artists and illustrators whose work was understandable and recognizable. They became people who experimented widely with what they were depicting in their work but also began to push the boundaries of what was considered to be visual art. It was about this time that visual artists began to be considered to be a bit off if you will. As soon as you moved into work which daubed paint in a manner that produced unrecognizable forms or stuck pieces of material together in abstract and visually chaotic, ways people began to question the artistic merit of the work and even whether or not it took artistic talent of all to produce what they were seeing. And once Duchamp opened the door to ready mades and "it's art because I say .it's art and I'm an artist", then people began to devalue the entire idea of someone who called themselves an artist. Thanks for that one, Marcel.
The further addition of kinetic art, situationist art, performance art, conceptual art, and all the other forms that have evolved since the end of World War II led to the public's ability, and for that matter desire, to determine what's going on in the art world being left behind. And thus we indeed need to be clearly labeled as artists because anyone who would want to make a book that turned black as you read it, or contained in its structure a radio broadcasting its content to no one, or someone who just thinks that making a book out of drawers full of clothes make some kind of sense is probably indeed "some kind of nutter."
A few days ago, I received this email from the folks at Jotta regarding the Unbinding the Book exhibition and their efforts to generate buzz:
Hello there
Hope you’re all good. Two quick questions.
1. The launch night for Unbinding the Book is on Thursday evening. We’ll be having a few drinks and there will be press in attendance from titles ranging from Art Review to the Guardian. Times are from 6-9pm. Can you confirm if you are able to attend or not? We’d of course love to have you there!
2. On the Friday between 3-4pm we have the lecture theatre to give a talk. We’re still working out how to programme this but are thinking we might do a panel discussion around some of the general themes explored in the project. Can I ask if anyone is up for being a part of the discussion? We’d really love to have 3-4 of you involved if possible.
thanks very much!
ben
The joys of exhibiting off your home ground, as it were, come into sharp focus here. I would, of course, love to be in London for the opening of the Exhibition. It seems the Jotta/Blurb team are doing a fine job of staging and publicizing the event. This would mean a chance to interact with the press and the public and I always love a good panel discussion, especially if I'm on the panel. While some artists hate talking about their work, those of us who don't mind, often can't be shut up once we get going.
However, a quick round of internet searching via kayak, etc. reveals the following:
Round trip ticket to London, $1200
3 nights lodging in London (low end to be sure) $ 250
Meals (and drinks) 3 days 3 meals each $ 200
transport $ 100
Sub-total (not including crap I'm forgetting) $1750
extra 10% for overages $ 175
Total $1925
So really, about 2 grand for 3 whirlwind days in London is a bit more than my current budget can absorb. So it's up to the UK artists to mesmerize the press and charm the public. I have no doubt they are up to it and I can't wait to see what they do.
I'll just be hunkering down here in the Bay Area and raising a glass or two to my cohorts across the pond.
Now that you've had a few days to think over the questions, here is what I sent back to the boys in England. The only questions are did I walk the line between pretentious and sincere well enough and would someone reading this believe me?
Before we start, a photo of the finished piece
What attracted you to the Unbinding the Book project?
I've had the idea for doing a piece based on the J. Alfred Prufrock poem for quite some time. This seemed like a great impetus for getting the piece done with the possibility of having it exhibited. You often have ideas for work that kick around in the background or fit into the "someday I'm going to do this" category, but without a specific theme or venue to provide some structure they often don't get done. We all work with ideas and projects we create without ever knowing whether they will be seen or not. The Unbinding the Book project provided a way that, if accepted, It would not only be completed but people were going to see it.
What drew you to the book as a medium?
I've always loved books. I grew up in a family of printers. My father was a typesetter, my uncle was a pressman, another uncle founded his own printing company. I can remember loading single sheets into a platen press when I was a small boy. Even today I have a day job as a rare book dealer. About 20 years ago while working with edge-lighting plastic sheet I realized that you could etch text into the plastic and have it appear to float in space. By combining that with a book form you could create a book-like object that appeared to have its content floating between the covers. I've been working on various forms of that kind of idea ever since.
Could you explain your practice?
A friend of mine William Wareham is a sculptor, a big steel guy. He always said that you treat your artwork like a job in that you go to your studio every day and you work at making art. That's the sort of thing I see as what you might call a practice. The ideas for my pieces can come in any time; middle of the night, early morning, afternoon, when I am at the studio or when I'm not at the studio. It's when I take those ideas to the shop and try to work out ways to turn them into real objects that what I would consider my practice comes into play. It's a matter of determining the form of construction, the content and the materials and then working out how the combination of those parts resolves itself into a piece that best expresses the idea that I have.
Could you describe your project?
The project is taking a small cabinet and treating it as though it were a chest of drawers containing the objects that J. Alfred Prufrock would wear. There are four drawers. The drawers are hinged at the front or rear of the drawer with piano hinges. The drawers themselves contain articles of clothing. The text of the poem is etched into clear acrylic sheets. The clear acrylic sheets have LEDs along the edges which project light into the sheets. The light goes through the sheets comes out through the etched letters causing them to glow and become readable. These sheets are placed top the drawers. The four drawer unit is pulled out of the cabinet and rotated 90° until it rests on the sides of the drawers. The drawers are then unfolded, if you will, into an accordion fold structure. The LEDs are plugged into a small transformer and the poem is illuminated above the contents of the drawers.
What materials are you incorporating into your work?
I think that was explained a bit in the previous question but to summarize I'm using a small cabinet, wood, acrylic sheet, warm white and cool white LEDs and cabinet hardware. In the drawers are 1910. era shirt, trousers, underwear, shirt collars and suspenders. There is also a small box containing cufflinks, shirt studs a pocket watch and there is a cigarette case.
What drew you to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock for this particular project? Do you find that poetry’s emphasis on subjective reading mean that it lends itself better to creative interpretation?
The Love song of J. over Prufrock is a poem that I have liked for a very long time. I was introduced to Elliott while studying poetry in college and I think Prufrock has a wonderful melancholic tone to it that probably fits my Slavic pessimism. I don't think that poetry's emphasis on subjective reading means it lends itself any better to creative interpretation than other forms of language. I think while poetry emphasizes emotion, feeling, and sheer linguistic play more than prose, nonetheless any form of written language lends itself to subjective interpretation. And I don't think that one can single out poetry as being any more or less suitable for creative interpretation. For instance I would love to do a William Burroughs style cutup piece with half the page being L. Ron Hubbard Scientology butted up against the other half of the page being the writing of Jacques Derrida. I think it would be wonderfully subjective and open to wildly creative interpretation in ways that in no way could poetry exceed.
Your two main mediums appear to be books and light. What motivates you to combine the two?
I could go on for quite a while in answering this question but as simply as I can put it light carries an enormous amount of symbolic weight. Light symbolizing warmth as supposed to cold, good as opposed to evil, safety as opposed to danger, and for my purposes, knowledge as opposed to ignorance. When you combine that particular symbolic dichotomy of knowledge versus ignorance with books, which are the repositories of language which is the medium or device we use to preserve knowledge; then the combination of light and language creates a synergy of the philosophic/emotional symbol with the physical symbols of language and structure of the book.
How do you feel that the visual elements to your work contribute to the viewer’s reading of the narrative?
I'm not sure what the contribution might be. The cabinet with clothing and other accessories all a bit worn, a bit tarnished, a bit dusty, suggest or illustrate an emotional tone. I've always read the poem as the expression of a man who didn't quite make it, was in the background, was a best friend but not the leading man, or as Brando put it in On The Waterfront "could've been a contender." But he was never able to push himself forward to grab the brass ring. He has settled before a life as a secondary character and while he seems to accept it, there is a great deal of sublimated regret. In the piece that I've created, perhaps the background illustrates a bit of that.
