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7 & 1/2 Acres |
2002-11-10 - 5:22 p.m. So I've been invited to be in this art show which is at a fairly prestigious place and is quite an honor only I am dreading it. I've put it off and put it off--actually that's not true. I had it arranged officially for my part of the bargain to occur last minute so it was formally put off. My part of the bargain was this--for me to go into the gallery space for three days and do a piece there on the wall. The whole deal was based on another body of work I did once on a residency in a studio space where I placed whole rolls of paper on the walls and with my eyes closed, did these drawings based on touch--I'd feel my way along the contours in the wall with pens, pencils, markers and the like. I'd follow the seams of where the sheets of drywall came together, cracks in the plaster, tack holes, a large fist hole (from some agonizing artist that occupied the studio before me?), etc. The results were these roadmaps of sorts that documented these actions in a physical space and a period in time. That whole concept still kind of excites me--to the extent that I think, "Oh yeah, that was cool, simple but complex." --yeah man. Ugh. I don't mean to belittle my idea and all but I'm just not into it right now (anymore?). Really, the big thing is that there's no investigation here for me right now--into this drawing that is. I was listening to Studio 360 this morning--they had Sebastian Yunger on who I must say, I think is more than some buff globe-trotting adventurer/journalist (for me, his reads go right there with my U.S. Army survival manual, or Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild--I can get into descriptions of what it is like for an entire fishing boat to be completely engulfed by the sea--and how you know how deep you are when you look out the window and the water is hazy, dark green, or black--and then how these boats can pop back out and keep on sailing). Anyway, they were talking about some artist from Ohio who has a body of works based on the earthquakes in California. He'd do these painstaking reproductions of quake caused cracks in plaster walls. That way he could bring a bit of himself to the work, he said. Why not just cut out the plaster walls and show those? I've been working on this drawing much of the afternoon and I keep feeling like--why not just show the damn piece of linoleom that I'm painstakingly tracing--just because I'm painstakingly reproducing it doesn't justify the action and the result and frankly, the original in this case is much more interesting. That my hand did it don't mean a thing and certainly doesn't make it an interesting piece of something to look at. So what am I to do? The finished piece has got to be paper or I'm disqualified and I've been to the gallery and they've got all the works already hung on both sides of me. They just need my piece and they'll be done. When I got done with school, I thought I was done with this feeling. Ugh.
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