robert smithson. crystallography. subjective (or macrobiotic) taxonomies such as the distinction between "wet" and "dry" artists. xmas lights, tinfoil, spraypaint, velcro, black plastic, cds, the spirals off spiral notebooks, plastic cutlery, chipped nail polish, three to six months ago, beaches the movie, barbra streisand, only sleeping off the drunk halfway - waking up with sticky mouth, a headache and vein pain.
"what should i be doing with my hands?" nothing must be twisted yawn only into shadows and stare well.take time into your own side. make incision inside. stop blood. insert time. suture your side.steer clear of the seer-ing apparatus, i.e. ghost-like imaginings, mystic apprehensions, prehensile visions, gnostic narcissisms, tensions of all typographies, and The Flattening.(Forget the Revision.)Re-member the Famous
i like the song "help" by the beatles. its a good song. a thirty-something song. a song for those in need. i just saw a grown man sobbing on TV. this is why i don't watch TV and maybe why I should start. we all need help.
Has history become ‘dead weight?’ Gille Deleuze asked in 1988, “should we go around erecting vertical axes and trying to stand up straight or, rather, stretch out, run along the horizon, keep pushing the plane further out? And what sort of verticality do we want, one that gives us something to contemplate or one that makes us reflect or communicate? Or should we just get rid of all verticality as transcendent and lie down hugging the earth, without looking, without reflecting, cut off from communication?â€I talked to Dana DeGuilio, a painter who occupies the studio across the hall from mine, a week or so ago. Her paintings interest me. Her manner is intriguing in light of the paintings. This is not a proper interview in that I did not write down or record her answers at the time, but I will attempt to recreate our conversation from the muddied memories of our talk. This in order to undermine both my own authorship and her reliability as interviewee in relationship to her work.Her body language is twitchy. Kinetic and jerky with hand motions like a snapping turtle. I asked her if I ought to consider her work as a kind of information filtering system (or anti-system.) The floor of her studio is a minefield of paint spills and crumpled paper. Newspapers are stacked and stuffed into a babel-like terrain. She said something about the newspapers possibly functioning as a type of alibi - a justification for painting. She asked me if the inhabitant of her studio appeared to have a disorderly mind. I am skeptical of the possibility of an orderly mind and told her so. The process of selection, of reducing the flow I=of images down to one single image seemed hierarchical - clinging to a kind of transcendence. But now, as I write, with only half-remembered musings, I am going through a kind of distillation. Her work is neither selction nor distillation, but it is also not an objective flattening. I sense a destructive impulse, a desire for annhilation of all this visual information. The paintings are poured and swept, scattered and torn, dunked and splatted, gunked and reworked into a mighty murk, but a murk with a formal beauty not easily won.I like the way she thinks in paint. When I asked what painters she admired, she brought up Philip Guston, Arshile Gorky, Cezanne. I added Giacometti and she agreed. What unites these artists is their struggle. The anxiety and perseverance manifest in paint. “I really like it when you stare at a painting for a long time, but then when you leave its presence, you cannot reconstruct it in your head. You just have to kind of gesture around inside your own muddled head, that part over there, this square in the corner, above that monkeyish something.â€She is referring to the way paintings can steal memory, obliterate what we call history, defy transcendence and force us to ‘lie down hugging the earth, without looking, without reflecting, cut off from communication.†And people wonder why painting is still relevant.
I'm with the band -pamela des barres (again) collected writings of robert smithson granta - the Krauts edition seek the extremes - lee lozano martin kippenberger madame bovary - ce n'est pas moi