Summer Sale

In an attempt to break the mold, I'm having a summer drawing sale, folks. Here's some of the inventory.
Feedback welcome.

Not unfocussed but bored

In lieu of writing today, I’ll quote from Margaret Talbot’s article in the New Yorker, “Brain Gain.” It appeared in the April 27 issue and discusses “concentration pills” like Ritalin, etc.

This is what popped out for me:

Both Chatterjee and Farah have wondered whether drugs that heighten users’ focus might dampen their creativity. After all, some of our best ideas come to us not when we sit down at a desk but, rather, when we’re in the shower or walking the dog—letting our minds roam. Jimi Hendrix reported that the inspiration for “Purple Haze” came to him in a dream; the chemist Friedrich August Kekule claimed that he discovered the ring structure of benzene during a reverie in which he saw the image of a snake biting its tail. Farah told me, “Cognitive psychologists have found that there is a trade-off between attentional focus and creativity. And there is some evidence that suggests that individuals who are better able to focus on one thing and filter out distractions tend to be less creative.”
[…]
“…I’m a little concerned that we could be raising a generation of very focussed accountants.”
[…]
The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.

Donkey Trail

Check out what's new on the Donkey Trail. Hee Waw.

I tag, therefore I am

I’m almost done watching a 2007 documentary called Bomb It about graffiti around the world. It’s overly edited – every second a new image or effect – but there’s lots of good stuff to hear and see.

I'm particularly attracted to a short segment on two Stockholm-based writers Pike and Nug, although I doubt “writing” is the right word; more spasmodic-primitive, instinctual-punk, territorial mark making.

In the video below, which remixes scenes from Bomb It, you can catch a clip.

Guest Post by Max Stevens: Dripping girls gone

(Le Roy Grannis, Hermosa Beach Strand, 1967)

Hello dear readers of Art On My Mind. Molly asked me to write down some thoughts on the subject of intuition in song lyrics, so here goes... Let me begin by asking you to make a comparison between two songs, "Califronia Girls" and the somewhat more obscure "Surf's Up".

Listen to "California Girls" here.
Listen to "Surf's Up" here.

Both songs have an evocative beauty that elevates the listener's soul into a state of all-out bliss. Somebody once asked me to describe the sensation I feel in my body when I hear a Beach Boys song, and the only way I could think of to describe it was as a "permanent orgasm." But there are different kinds of orgasm, and I think Molly is onto something with her interest in intuition in song and art more generally. ...The meaning of "California Girls" is transparent and its impact on the listener is immediate. It's the California Dream writ large, California at the absolute pinnacle of its post-war expansion, a world of golden sands, endless leisure, youthful exuberance, and beautiful girls dripping with perfect, nubile sexuality. The serpent has yet to appear with its fateful apple, and the emergent youth culture remains outside the messy world of political struggle. Listening to "California Girls" is an immensely satisfying experience, but it's also an exercise in passivity and escapism.

"Surf's up," which Brian Wilson wrote about a year later with Van Dyke Parks, reflects the enormous cultural changes that took place in the mid 60s. Returning to the biblical metaphor, the song is an expression of the youth movement after it has eaten from the tree of knowledge. And what's really fascinating is that the new-found knowledge and experience paradoxically make the world a much more complicated place...

Surf's Up
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children's song

I remember taking an interest in postmodernism as a college student and learning about how the information age would ultimately destroy any notion of timeless, absolute truth. Knowledge, in other words, makes the world less knowable. "Surf's Up" seems to be a musical instantiation of an increasingly unknowable world. Whereas with "Califronia Girls," the payoff is immediate and transparent, requiring very little work on the part of the audience, "Surf's Up" is opaque, associative, and brings the listener actively into the creative process. The meaning of the song is intuitive, subjective and much more slippery as a result. "California Girls" is one of my favorite songs ever, but the experience of hearing Surf's Up - with its thought fragments and words that are more about rhythmic sound than imagery - is quite a bit more satisfying because its meaning is contingent on my creativity as a listener. I appreciate songwriting that places a certain amount of trust in the audience. I would imagine that this is true of anyone who takes the practice of artistic appreciation seriously. There are sublime works of art that ask nothing more of us than to observe some fixed concepts and emotions, and then there are those where the artist communicates intuitively with the audience and, in doing so, demands that the audience contribute to the work's impact. Both have their place, but the latter is ultimately more gratifying.

Max Stevens is a writer living in Los Angeles. Molly and Max are brother and sister.

Donkey Trail: Hee Haw Hee Haw

Time to check out the new post on the Donkey Trail.

You're a vegetable, You're a vegetable

The use of intuition is commonly disregarded, considered, as it is, to be unquantifiable and ungraspable. No data.

But intuition crops up nonetheless, perhaps in its most popular form as lyrics. It takes intuition to write them, and it definitely takes intuition to take them in.

If you think about it, they usually make absolutely no sense. But so what. You’re not supposed to think about it. You’re just supposed to get a sense of a song, get its tone through tone.

I’m often the kind of listener who just doesn’t pay attention to lyrics at all because they’re just too confusing. My rational mind, which I have a hard time putting on the back burner, feels frustrated because it can’t figure it all out. But I do see the joy and the deep emotional resonance that music lovers feel from lyrics and their combination with melody. So I’ve always wanted to work on it, although “work on” is not what one does with a sense of feel, me thinks.

To finish off Michael Jackson week here at Art on My Mind, let’s end with these lines. Can you identify the song to which they belong?

You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable
Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable
You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable
They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable

Ride the Boogie

The lesser the effort, the greater the achievement.

While this strikes me as counter-intuitive, I’m seeing its truth in all kinds of places. For example, Michael Jackson’s dancing. While I’m totally dazzled by the robot moves (if I could move my shoulder just once like that, I’d be impressed with myself), what really gets me going is the smooth and loose style, like in the video below.

It’s not that he isn’t disciplined; there’s control behind all his moves. But when it’s time for actual boogieing, the concentration is left behind and the body takes over and does its thing.

Take it from him:

There ain’t nothing that you can do
Relax you mind
Lay back and groove with mine.

Michael Jackson - New Music - More Music Videos

Hee Haw, Hee Haw

There's something new on the Donkey Trail. Check it out.

Future Unknown

In the upcoming months, here at Art on My Mind, I will be considering the question of intuition and non-sense, especially as it applies to art making and viewing. I’ll be talking with artists, friends, shrinks, I’ll be looking into Zen and other spiritual philosophies, body work, brain work, animal behavior, I’ll be trying to understand how (and also why) people draw, paint, write and how they come up with ideas. I’ll also be looking at shows, reading reading, and all with the intent of broadening an understanding of the ungraspable sense that is intuition.

The initial bias is that what we label as non-sense makes more sense. Sound vague? It is and I’d like to keep it that way for once.

For those concerned, I’ll still be bitching about how difficult everyday art making is, and also reporting on what’s up on the scene.

To add to the happy mess is the overlap this project will have with the development of Donkey Trail, both the blog and the exhibition. When something’s happening over there, I’ll post a hee haw hee haw over here.

As Eloise says, “Ooooooooo I absolutely love Room Service.”

Any initial thoughts you might have on this subject are of course welcome.

Donkey Trail

Straight from the Donkey's mouth:

I've been on this path for a while now, with these sacks on my back. This morning I tripped on a rock. So I’ll just stop in front of this one right here. Come to think of it, if I go this way, it’s still up. Nice roses. Ouch.

Donkey Trail: an exhibition being developed by Nils Folke Anderson and Molly Stevens, opening May 2010 at Slag Gallery in New York. Maturing until then right here at Art on My Mind, or visit the Donkey Trail link on the sidebar.

Rhymes with the plural of (window) SILL

Very soon, perhaps even on Wednesday, I'll be announcing an exciting project (if I do say so myself), one that I'm developing in collaboration with my friend, the artist Nils Folke Anderson. Stay tuned!

But today, allow me to briefly introduce you to Nils's work.

Take the piece shown above. What I like is that I have a visceral relationship to it - it's not a model of an idea or an illustration that I observe. That's not to say that I couldn't consider this piece - a set of interlocking and moveable Styrofoam squares – a mathematical conundrum. And as an afterthought this is indeed interesting.

But what strikes me first, along with its balanced good looks, is its scale, which is bigger than me, but smaller than monument. Next to it, I don't feel dwarfed or nullified, but rather distinctly human, and humbled at that. Also as such, I want to touch it, move it. If I were to do so (but I prefer to watch someone else do that, or just imagine), I would end up becoming aware of the piece's possibilities, and also how it is that I move differently in comparison. So I come to have an appreciation of the thing through my experience of it.

The piece is arranged in a formation to suit a specific site; and the little pellets shed through the installation process are also left in the space. This immediately counteracts any pretensions of permanence and importance, making it all the more so, if you ask me.

Consider this post a starting point.

What's up on 24th

(Kim Dorland, RIP Tom Thomson, 2009, courtesy Freight + Volume)

A run across 24th Street yesterday yielded the following miscellaneous thoughts:

The large paintings by Albert Oehlen at Luhring Augustine are stereotypes of art itself, what I imagine the popular image of art to be: a little bit of collage, a splash of paint, and the very important "wha?" Wouldn't the work be perfect for Lily van der Woodsen's home on Gossip Girl.

Across the way at Freight and Volume are intriguing landscapes by Kim Dorland in which urban life encroaches on our pristine conception of nature. In general, give me trees or graffiti (above, both!) and I'm happy. But, with these, am I happy because of what it reminds me of, or because of what's actually in front of me?

It was nice to see the Christopher Wool in the window at Stellan Holm, and also the below painting in the back entitled Unworkable Machine. Upon learning that it was made by William S. Burroughs, I began to wonder if paintings can have a literary esthetic. If so, am I attracted to the wordiness of it?





















(William S. Burroughs, Unworkable Machine, 1993, courtesy Stellan Holm Gallery)

Boden Sea

Perhaps the visual opposite of last week's Tibetan landscape are Hiroshi Sugimoto's renowned seascapes, for example the image of the Boden Sea from 1993 above. With each image offering the same balance of water and sky and a particular play of light and texture, the series is really a study in the subtleties of stillness, the kind that Japanese Zen surely informs. As someone who's mind has perhaps never been this poised, I can nevertheless take in the piece as a possibility, as an illustration of how it could be. And there'd still be the crowded train car.

The series reminds me that an artist finds a landscape and then makes it his own. Sugimoto certainly approached the sea and the darkroom with a vision in mind. What we see is really a combination of the outer and inner image.