Good Ideas happen to good people.

So - I just was talking to a friend of mine and he was arguing against Damien Hirst's piece. First of all, this is an old argument, why are we still having it? We are in a depression and new art is happening - why are we still talking about the diamond skull? Anyway, we are lamenting economic issues and I thought of a funny idea - if you are going to complain about Hirst's piece (and I still think it was super smart) than subvert it on it's own grounds - be a smarty pants and do something funny like "corner the diamond market" That way the genius it rests on, that it can't be under valued because of some sort of "Essential" value, is subverted since diamonds are not necessarily, inherently of value. Then you have a piece that is as genius as Hirst's but with the opposite conscience. Even more genius. If Damien did it, like undoing every wrong that any academic ever accused him of doing. amazing.

that kind of music - that's the kind I like.

I want to hear symphonies written with Alibini riffs - like instead of the rock opera - so it's opposite the 70's - just awesome guitar riffs that sound like Albini composed as a huge symphony - not a guitar symphony like Branca or Chatham, it's not about layering guitars like violins - and it's not like what Hunter's doing cause those are short form. This would be long form - more hardcore kind of riffs. Like sleep, but short riffs woven like counterpoint, that makes sense, right? I also think Alibini riffs sound good on toy piano. There is something really funny to me about that. I like this idea cause it's all the "uncool" things, There is no pinball wizard here, but then maybe that is what would be cool - a video that was more straightforward (with a twist like that last thing I did where the static objects are moving pictures - make fun of an "everyman" play from the middle ages and each character is a silhouette with an assigned moving image - get all captain America and incorporate 70-'s rock - earth wind and fire saving the world or something... then why not* get ham fisted and make a polluted environment to be projecting on...) It could be like a bad/AMAZING physical/auditory thing - structured chaos. I use cool meaning popular. Weird that I am doing that cause it doesn't mean the same thing in the real world as it did in high school. I'm imagining an animation like that video I did where all static objects are moving picture or something. Anyway that would be my dream music and I just thought of that video. COOL. There would have to be subtitles though - they would be funny.

210?!

So - Went to my old Prof's, Michael Brennan's, opening tonight and I had many ideas. My favorite of which is:
I was thinking of someone I knew in college - Henry Casey. Dude was/is very cool for many reasons but he used to do something that I always found really funny - he would update his live journal as though there were "fans" reading in real time to get the latest updates on his whereabouts etc. This is common place now with twitter, facebook, myspace etc. being forwarded to cell phones - I told you dude was cool, ahead of his time, but at the time, and really still now, it struck me as funny that anyone would assume the world was that interested in his/her quotidian minutiae. At this point, it seems like a given to me, and everyone who is familiar with our culture - again, dude had his finger on the pulsea - ahead of his time, so what I thought would be interesting is if someone were to completely fabricate an identity, update those pages as though s/he were real, give twitter updates revealing his/her likes, dislikes, and whereabouts, at any given moment, and s/he would remain sought after forever since they would never be found - an impossibility since they are figments of fiction to begin with. The person I first told this to said a friend of hers gave an assignment to his/her students that was similar - made them all create fake facebook aliases - but this is a bit further, create an entire persona - complete with tastes and regular hot spots who will forever remain elusive but completely current. This "entity" could even be the product of a collective/corporation - think if Bruce High Quality were a fabledliving artist instead of a dead artist who left ideals behind - if Bruce were a character of actions and agency - a current and forever hip entity - the "Barbie" of the art world - current because he's the a product of an enveloping ideal, not a static personality with dated/limited tastes. This character could be the advertising of Art with consistently relevant and current references because of it's shifting body of participants. This would facilitate/ create followers of a ghost. I like the idea - I think it would be the greatest piece ever if part of me did not believe it is already a part of the Bruce's vision, if it is not ,in the very least, more than an offshoot of that thinking. There is more but this is all I can muster at the moment - already imitating Henry Casey, with the idea that there is a live audience waiting on my thoughts/whereabouts in life and space, perfectly. godspeed.

somethings take a long time to get out - seeded this when I was 18...

I was talking about this last year to some dude in a bar - I must be soo appealing to try to flirt with - anyway, talking about how something is more true when it's itself and not at the same time. Like it's both sincere and ironic at the same time. That's what I am talking about with using music in conjunction with image, especially music that has lyrics and sound at odds with each other - you know, my favorite black celebration example.

have you read the Liturgy manifesto? This is in response to Kell but I know Hunter is ontop of the simultaneous opposites - point of tension...

To categorize and make the division "art" means that you are creating a language right there. You've set up a schema that can then have it's own rule set and it's logic. Now, anyone can interpret the stimulus however they want - regardless of the predominant means that the "art world" is interested in, but if you are actually interested in communicating everything - you have to go be using the widely accepted de-coding methods being used by the general art crowd, otherwise what are you doing and why even bother calling something art or not in the first place, you know? This doesn't mean that the art has some predetermined meaning to be unlocked once you crack some code - but it does mean that there are cues to clue you into the what the art is. I get that Pollack isn't a symbolic guy but his work can be interpreted as a record of gestures, spread of a new western mind frame which was dispersed by those art dealers keeping him "wet," or as aesthetically pleasing splotches for your wall. In this way I don't think that art is a first experience, it is a referent. Be it symbolic or not, it's existence suggests more than the object itself, necessarily, in order for it to be art. in that way is is a referent even if the art isn't a 1:1 symbolic relationship with an underlying idea, does that make sense? Art can be a primary experience but it can never be the thing itself - it is a referent.

I'm definitely not talking about relativism, I am talking about a system of simultaneous opposites. I say that because that is the part that does help me/people live their lives. If art, the kind that I'm talking about which can take any and all forms, the ways that I think Bruce High Quality and my early videos/thesis work are successful is because I think that they overlay different perspectives simultaneously - not undermining any perspective, but rather embodying more than one perspective at a time so that the viewer is not placed, by "de-coding" the object/piece/performance/etc, in a clear spot with a particular idea - instead it's a sort of detached acknowledgement of a situation - you don't have to feel so married to any conviction, therefore you are less slighted when your belief is undermined. I think that is a helpful everyday idea. I haven't figured out how to make that work yet, but if I can, and I think art can, than that's an awesome end and it doesn't mean relativism. I will give you that even if this is my aim my subject matter has been frivolous but I'll say this - I don't think I am stupid and I find this to be a complex way to build and present ideas, maybe starting off presenting more frivolous ideas this way is the way to go - going back to what you said two of your e-mails ago, do this play with something simple and then apply it to ideas with more weight - to do everything at once would be impossible - I started out with technicolor cartoon collages trying to emulate 50's masters - this idea was a seed... it takes time. The art dealers also have nothing to so with this idea - it's a language structure more than a product that in no way prohibits the existence of a product - I'm not interested in that part of art at all. That's the shit everyone has been talking about forever and it bores me whether I understand it or not - makes me want to sleep thinking about that stuff.

I brought up Jackson Pollack as an example of a situation that can be read, I gave three but I am sure there are more ways. The way the I am saying these analyses do help me/one live their life is that in being able to see something in two distinct perspectives t the same time, ones ability or predisposition of disappointment. emotional pain, jealousy etc. is less because you aren't ever too attached to your own perspective, it barely exists without being in relation to something else - this is an idea deeply rooted in Pragmatism.

Awe-Sine

I'm digging playing my toy piano right now.

what I'm saying is, on a certain level, subject doesn't matter since art is necessarily a step removed. and that's what bothers me and makes me feel like it's frivolous, cause its necessarily divorced and that, in my mind, diminishes it's power. I know this is me being hard and placing unnecessary value judgements against myself, but since it isn't dealing immediately with the matter at hand, by being say a politician rather than political artist, that's where I feel guilty even if I know I wouldn't be so good at that anymore since I indulged so hard

Different note - Left my bike with a copy of Dr.Faustus in the water holder outside my apt - someone stole it! assholes. I saw it as a nice metaphor - literature quenching my thirst for knowledge - but no it's stolen and possibly the tragic sounding board to my life. Now that's funny. I wonder if Hunter finished reading that, he suggested it to me two years ago...

In Response to Kell Condon, one of the smartest most awesome of art dudes around.

art, necessarily to be art, is not real - is not the first experience, the first response, the immediate anything - that is if it is going to be symbolic and deal with issues. Let me try to explain what I mean another way - Take Jackson Pollack. You can either look at those painting as a record, diary as you called it before, of gestures that the dude was making in a room with paint, or you can take them a symbolic statement about the state of painting, or you can talk about them as the spread of western culture through the eastern block during the cold war. Depending on how you look at them, they can take on very different social meanings or not - they can be completely aesthetic records, or simply records of actions past. Let's talk about this in a tri-fecta way of seeing a piece of art, of witnessing each perspective at the same time - it's like Picasso in motion or reality or something. You know what I mean? What I am interested in is something that is both irreverent and poignant at the same time, holding both perspectives at once but not in such a literal way that I want to paint each perspective superimposed like the picasso joke I just made, in a viewpoint sort of way. I think I err on the side of frivolity often because it is more fun and simpler, but I what I am going for is poignant tragedy that makes you cackle or utter stupidity, (and this isn't original, can we say shakespeare?) that holds the truth... I don't know, I have done an had so many different view points in my life that I find it difficult to want to commit fully to any one - they all hold something important and so it's their ability to exist in tandem that I am interested in. I don't know if that just sounds like a lot of pretentious hooey but that's where my head has been lately. I also think that is something to think about - wars are started cause people don't understand grey areas/grey alliances contexts, simultaneous and opposing viewpoints in tandem. When I feel like art is too frivolous is when I chastise myself for screwing around a lot because in my fantasy world I would have tried to be a politician and I like to blame my propensity for screwing around on the fact that my head is not quite clear enough to have done that - that it works this way instead. I shouldn't say that though, there are different ways to affect the world around you, but I was much more clear headed in my younger days and sometimes romanticize what might have been, you know? It's easy to do that. Anyway, I see no reason that you can't be in all spaces at once - Dumbo, Bushwick, Riverdale, Wisconsin, Berlin, all at once. It may take some serious team work but it works. And it's not about being everything to everyone, it's about incorporating something from everyone into a unity. NOT in a hippy way. In a deep cool way. And there is humor and realism incorporated - not for the hippies, though the hippies probably get the sentiment better than anyone, you know?

This would be cool - skin suit (second skin...)

So my freshman year of college my friend Eliza took these awesome black and white photos of a dude in one of those tacky t-shirts with a woman's body in a bikini printed on them. This is my more jackass idea - get a dude to wear a full body spandex suit with his body, spider veins, stretch marks and all, painted photo-realistically on the suit so it just looks like a naked dude standing in front of you. Have the "This is not a pipe" discussion ad nauseum.

Authenticity/Consistency

So, plunging the depths of what is most crucial in life, I am thinking about Authenticity and Consistency probably cause I have been cloistered in my apt. too long working on and with what feel like only my own feces. sweet.

I remember my freshmen year at Bard College - that's the first time I even considered this question - before that I was just making friends and being exposed to amazing things all the time. I would take what I liked and pair it with other things I liked. An artist about ten years before I figured out I should be calling myself that. The best thing I ever made, to this day, was a rose that was just a blow pop wrapper shredded and tied to a dry rose stem. It was so much cooler than giving a real rose on valentines day and I gave it to the dude. Better. But back to Authenticity. I remember how intimidated I was when I got to Bard - I had never been around so many fashionable people before. A friend turned to me and said, "It's hard to believe that they have parents, it's like they just appeared. Out of no where." They were all so attractive I was intimidated. I had never seen anything like these kids - I didn't read fashion mags, the only thing I did was go to shows, play keyboard with my friends, and vintage clothing shop - I always looked like a doll dragged through a stack of t-shirts, it was awesome but these kids were like models doing it. Looking back, I think my friend, who was a model but a modest one, were more intimidated by the fact that these kids were interested in the same things but so very attractive. Jealousy makes it easy to second guess motivation, but back to my point.

I think that an artist, to be any good and have an evolving body of work, has to be able to take anything in and spit it out with their twist - or something less goofy sounding. I had a friend in high school, Andrew, who would talk about this - he was a huge influence. He always talked about how he didn't feel like he was expressing anything, he was vomiting out what the world fed him. I have never heard anything smarter said about art and I think it takes care of any question of Authenticity or consistency (though it is a "who should get paid" nightmare...oh well.) That allows for a totally disparate body of work since all that is needed is a being to take in stimulus and spit out something that isn't what went in - we all become functions. And, since humans change, they needn't be static functions. In college I wrote my thesis on Pierce's theory of truth - the idea that a consistent system of logic and a clear definitions for universally accepted terms could allow for different eras to believe different truths while still allowing for an absolute standard against which these truths could be measured. If the artist is considered to be a logical system, which necessarily changes over time as new truths and trends are discovered, then the art is authentic and consistent for this reason alone and doesn't need further justification. An artist DOESN'T have to pick a "thing" to do.

saccharine instruments recorded like clipping distortion - cell phone ring 6

saccharine instruments recorded like clipping distortion - cell phone ring 5

saccharine instruments recorded like clipping distortion - cell phone ring 4

saccharine instruments recorded like clipping distortion - cell phone ring 3

Saccharine instruments recorded like clipping distortion - cell phone ring 2

Redneck homophobic humor -

My good idea: Make a swinging gay men's gym where the dangling punching bags are stuffed disco balls that spew glitter. offensive.

Your home is where you're happy. my apt. drawing by Greg Parma smith - thanks!

shroom of the loom

(my nose doesn't look like that - weird camera effect...)

"You've been Schooled" Series made by assembling composition notebooks to make maps of the countries the U.S. has fought. video to come soon too.

for hubble - a yarn hubble telescope.

We Like America and America Likes Us

I love Bruce High Quality - They do things with video that I think about. Their video, “We Like America and America Likes Us” is amazing. The narrative goes with and against what are otherwise completely unrelated clips that are given meaning through their placement next to each other (eisensteinian…) and the superimposed narrative that they juxtapose and support at different times. I love it. but there is more to it - I used to talk about this with friends - ways of incorporating pop music to change the way something appears/it’s meaning. And it's projected in the ghost busters car poorly enameled white. People reference it as a white herse, it's the ghost busters car, they use clips from the movie. it's awesome. I think about this whole true/truer thing a lot. When I was in high school, I had just had an awful week before my 18th birthday, I had just come back from the worst week ever. I got in my car to drive to school really early and put on “Black Celebration” cause I was all depressed, for good reasons, but it’s synth pop so I subverted the emotion into something happy while also indulging in the darkness - it’s what goth is but when applied to an actual problem, there is something funny and weird there. It’s true and not true at the same time - it’s funny.

I’ve used this line a million times but I always say - I bet I had coined this back in Tivoli - if Aliens came down to earth they would think that our art is T.V. movies (I guess…but they are so LONG…attention spans have to shift a lot to keep these in the paradigm…)and billboards. In that way I have started to think about art in a really conservative way - like trickle down economics. I made that joke at my Bard thesis - that philosophers work out bigger “annoying” intellectual ideas, come up with a shared language, and then somehow those decisions are manifest in the language that everyone uses/the way that things are structured. Though a layman might never concern themselves with these questions, they are affected by and utilize the choices made by the dominant intellectual thinkers of the time. Same with art. A bunch of weirdos hole up, do whatever they do, come up with awesome ideas that are eventually co-opted and used for advertising - but at the same time that is the way that a new aesthetic influences new and non-elite eyes.

Re: the issue of “elite” Sure, the pure of heart can do the stuff for the sake of it, but at the same time it’s no less self-indulgent than the elitist/ritzier model, you know? Not saving lives is not saving lives and art, at the heart of it, no matter how much you intellectualize what it “represents” or what it’s “cultural significance” is (and, on a certain level, I do really believe in these things, we live in a culture and I would rather focus on the part of it that wants to break ideas down by making things than streamlined facism for sure) Art is never going to be real or feel guilt free - nothing enjoyable ever will and I think that it’s a mistake to assume that just because it isn’t aiming for grand culture ground or significance (not trying to get into the gallery scene), that it is any more nobel or less self-indulgent. That is still the problem I can’t get past - the self-indulgence. And dude, I am not one to talk, I spent so much fucking money on a “work/professional” wardrobe last year and shit that makes me want to die. I am as lost as anyone about what any of this means, I am still sitting at home in my sweatpants. Oh, and I spent money on four shots at a metal show. Late blooming/prolonged teenager-dom is not winning the good person award any time soon.