david shrigley

i first saw david shrigley's work in chelsea -- i forget which gallery -- last time i was in NYC. definitely one of the best shows i saw. the work has a great hickish quality about it, kind of creepy and funny, sometimes because it can be so anticlimactic. the wit seems to come from a darkly absurd place. anyway, i love it.

SF window

winnie

just finished a long and extremely intricate account by winston churchill of the time between the world wars. the theme of the story is that WWII was one of the easiest wars to prevent, but repeatedly poor decisions by the governments of europe based on wishful thinking enabled germany to rearm. churchill tried for years to convince the british government of its continued oversight and the growing dangers that resulted. eventually it was too late. but he never stopped trying, even though most of his words went against the mood of the times. he was a nagging political presence, but his words were brought to truth almost like prophecy.

strange for me to think about people like this. people who clearly had some major historical role in their destiny. or at least it seems this way in retrospect. i used to think that people like this mattered more than other people. it's an awful thing to admit, but thankfully i don't feel this way anymore.

my father told his story over thanksgiving about how he's made a living throughout his life, his decision to preempt the draft and enroll in the military, his determination to have his own business and why, etc. i don't know how someone does this. obviously, necessity forces one to figure it out.

taped window

chad person: recess

i've been spending a lot of time tonight with the work of chad person via his website and youtube. his ongoing project for at least a couple of years now is called recess, which deals with self-reliance and centers around a bunker he has created by retrofitting his backyard swimming pool.

the latest development in this project is that just a few days ago the BATFE confiscated one of his pieces from this body of work (shown above), which was being held by mark moore gallery in santa monica. i'm fascinated by this. i simply cannot believe that they have nothing better to do than raid art galleries for homemade weapons...on the other hand, i can totally believe that this is what they choose to spend their time and taxpayers' money on.

but this illustrates why i think person's work is so successful. it addresses issues anyone can relate to and enters the world in a way art seldom does.

...suddenly i'm starting to wane tonight. about time.

there's more i want to write, but it'll have to wait. i encourage you to visit his website for now. the link below is for his recorded live webcam videos from when he lived in his bunker for a week.

http://chadperson.com/recess/bunker/

SF window

Body Slam

Introduction

There is nothing more conventional in an art gallery than the arrangement of paintings on the walls. They exist as precious, untouchable objects meant for our passive, admiring gaze only. I propose to work within this familiar context to challenge notions of entertainment, which has become even more complicated in our increasingly virtual world. Our entertainment can quickly turn into complacency. I will create a performance and installation that challenges this complacency and questions the ethics of entertainment on an utterly physical level.

Performance and Installation

The performance will result in the creation of approximately 12 individual wall pieces. For each piece, liberal amounts of house paint and acrylic color will be pressed against the wall with a glass sheet. Suited in protective gear, I will build up sprinting speed and hurl myself against the glass and pressed paint, cracking the glass and splattering the paint. Some of the broken glass will fall, but most of it will stick to the wall, held in place by acrylic gel-thickened paint. This process will be repeated as quickly as possible until all the wall pieces are complete.

The performance and its resulting wall pieces are the central focus of this project and will occupy roughly half the wall space in the gallery. The inclusion of concept sketches, studies, related art objects, and visual documentation of previous performances will fill the remainder, providing greater insight into my process.

Purpose and Impact

This performance problematizes the passive act of looking, dissolving the comfortable remove between art and audience. The longer the audience watches my repeated thrashings, the longer they remain complicit in my potential self-injury. Through the thick smell of paint, the violent splattering of color, and the sounds of my crashing body breaking glass, I will create a palpable tension between the audience’s desire for spectacle and their fears for my well-being. In this way, I intend to create a work, both in the performance and resulting installation, that connects with the audience on a gut level.

The Heights

connectivity

you have to tell people things about yourself, otherwise they won't know. there is value in this. it's not self-promoting. it is connecting. actions do not always speak louder. actions don't exist if they aren't witnessed, and sometimes the only way to share them with people -- and share yourself -- is to talk about these actions. direct experience is extremely rare and limited.

NM

talking through

2 views outside the bedroom window

i still struggle to cope with doing anything. 6 billion people is far too many. and i am one of them. that sounds morbid. i don't mean to suggest that i shouldn't be here, but rather, what can i contribute? ughh.

creating STUFF is a problem, and i am a stuff maker. a very poor one since i don't have any space to store the stuff i would make. so i have all these theoretical projects. they need funding, space and an audience. most importantly they need the commitment to bring them into being. i feel like if i had a stronger commitment, i would have done some of these projects by now. but i can't deny that the thought of adding more stuff to a world of stuff is discouraging.

new painting in progress

this is a current painting in progress. the jury's still out as to whether or not the project as a whole is worth pursuing, but it's essentially about documenting my performances through the painted image. these were quick snapshots with minimal editing. it's a 2-panel painting arranged the way you see here, but with greater continuity between panels (here it looks too broken as the image moves between panels. this is because of my cropping of the digital image). the panels are arranged in this way to emphasize instability of block structures created in the original performance. the scale is 1 to 1.

zhang huan and performance art

Body art subverts all traditional definitions of art. When artists use their own bodies as an art material, normal distinctions between creator and created disappear. By becoming art themselves, they render disinterested aesthetic judgments of the art object absurd or irrelevant. Because the "artwork" is also a sentient, reasoning being, body art brings moral, ethical, and political issues into play.
-Eleanor Heartney from Huan's website

i came across this image recently in one of my art books. what really impacted me was the inclusion of tethered dogs in a performance that seems pretty intense to begin with. for me, it makes the piece even stranger and more provocative. the dogs are at once wild animals and yet domesticated. their indifference to both art and another's suffering intensifies the loneliness and futility of the performance. i've read that this piece was meant to reference huan's feeling of alienation in his new home of New York. in his futile attempt to warm the ice with his body, the reverse effect happened, and the ice drove his body temperature dangerously low. his ambitious intentions were thwarted by harsh reality at the risk of serious injury. the tethered dogs know nothing of this, the performance's meaning is lost on them. nor are they guardians for huan. they are there only because they are tied there. this strange coexistence is unsettling and not easy to resolve. it seems to be the personification of alienation and the feelings of impotence and futility that must surely follow.

fear: pt II

the mock-up below is a concept sketch for the "documentary painting project" i've begun to develop recently. i wanted to conceive of painting that was decidedly documentary, but at home with its stark differences with transient, material-based performances. in other words, it would reveal how documentation, if it's done right, is really it's own thing entirely. i don't mean to sever the ties to the original performance piece, but rather that there's really no way i can create an appropriate document for it. it's led me to consider how i'd paint a video still, say. more later...

but fear.... one of the inspirations behind Painting Complex was the tower of babel, which, for all of you not up on your biblical studies, was a tower meant to be so tall that it reached god. god became offended and gave humanity chaos as punishment. the chaos was different languages, leaving people unable to communicate with each other. i don't know if the tower actually crumbled, but it seems like it should have. in any case, this seemed to me a perfect metaphor for human ambition gone too far.

countless examples throughout history could also be invoked. any once great civilization that has gone into ruin, and left behind actual ruins. inevitable collapse, death, suffering has always been very difficult for me to reconcile. i think one reason why this piece worked was my introduction of play for issues otherwise so weighty. my use of paint made my actions even more inevitably ruinous, which compelled me to be even more urgent (uh-oh...this is going to go south fast, so i better get as much splattering done as i can. come on! go! aggghh! paint in my eye! no time to stop! go go go!!!). i think this kept the piece from being an act of self-destruction.

fear

fear became a central theme for my work when i participated in the Land Arts of the American West program at UNM in 2002. i remember distinctly when. it was our first real campsite, not too far from the valley of the gods in Utah. our camp was on top of a mesa. one day when i ventured out for inspiration the thought occurred to me that anything could happen out here, including falling over the edge of the sheer cliffs. this thinking inspired my work Cliffhanger.

fear of falling is countered by a desire to climb. in such a litigative culture this is problematic when it comes to the body, but encouraged in the business of acquiring monetary wealth. ruin is the object of fear, and it is only possible through risk (which is also what you do when you play). one's body can be ruined by falling, and a wealthy culture can also fall into ruin. i find the divergent attitudes interesting.

...

filling time and space, so...

new

the work on panel (shown in previous post) is very close to doing as much as i can do with the process and general approach i've set for myself. i can't get past the fact that this is still not enough to really connect with people. i think, fundamentally, this work is about my fears. it's what inspired the vine imagery (fear of entanglement), a sense of distant light (a goal to be reached), and the general sense of isolation (that one's pretty clear). in an attempt to make the work less dismal, i wanted to introduce color, which i think worked pretty well in the lithographs i made, but not so well in my early panel paintings. lately, i've veered more towards neutral, and i think the results are better, but my feeling is that i've gone as far as i'd hoped to get with these. i've reflected on my fears with this work, hoping all the while that the process will somehow help me to get past my fears, and it just might well have. at least the self-generated ones, which have been the most crippling and senseless ones.

a few months ago i committed myself to making 40 paintings on panel based on vine imagery and emphasizing directness of process. They were intended to be minimal, yet somehow i wanted to introduce some sense of humor, careful not to venture into self-parody. i think the latest few i did accomplished these things, but despite this apparent success, they seemed inaccessible. there was something important about this, i thought, and i believe that it is this inaccessibility that is at the root of my fears. fear of not being understood. fear of what would happen if i ever were understood (would i just become commonplace?). i then realized that this fear led nowhere, that i could do nothing with it. at this point i decided that whatever the reality is, i cannot do this to myself. i can't let myself be paralyzed by this fear. and then i realized that i had reached the end of this work. a premature end to my 40 paintings.

i think this work was important for me to make, even if i'm bringing it to an abrupt halt, which i promised myself i wouldn't do. it is a bridge, nearly five years in the making, between being a student and a professional artist. i reflected on my self-doubt, my worries, and my hopelessness for the future (of both humanity and myself), and then today i realized that my reflection on these things was an endless cycle. it would never change. it's a realization i needed to make to get myself out of the cycle.

amidst it all: 2 nu pics of blurry paintns

dogs

feeling bored with posting something about myself, i decide instead to revisit one of my favorite videos out there. hats of to my brother jody for sending me the link about a year ago. i'm glad it's still on youtube.

enjoy.

blake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xENNnpQeKcM

golden mean

these prints are available on etsy: http://www.etsy.com/shop/blakegibson

vein

some 2009 paintings revisited

resistance is futile

a line can imply either movement or a barrier, which is a stoppage. a crack is an effect of movement that breaks the uniformity of a material. i always believed that for something to move, it must do so in resistance to some other force. from this perspective, i saw the air not as an absence of material but (among other things) a physical vehicle for the growth of branches.

a screen of branches evokes a desire to push through.

if an obstacle is interfering with the direction of movement, then it is important to face this obstacle. Both the pushing through or a turning away will have value.

renee's on

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/07/75-reasons-renee-green/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sfmoma%2Fblog+%28OPEN+SPACE%29

branches and lines

thinking about the point at which nature becomes a mark. fundamentally, i guess, this is a question of representation. despite such a rich history of this question trying to be resolved, it's still essentially a mystery, what occurs between the perceived world and interpreting this perception.

there's something awkward about this too, which intrigues me. i'm thinking right now about deKooning's women. why such spontaneous, energetic, and at times violent marks would have to come together to create an image of something other than what it is, and particularly an image of a woman, always seemed a very awkward thing to me. a strange goal and an awkward marriage of ideas and actions.

but there's something i like about this. there really was no hiding the fact that deKooning's marks were firstly about the action of making these marks, and secondly about the collective coming together of these marks to represent something entirely different, which of course influences how the action of these marks is viewed (was he angry at women, was he just having fun, was "woman" a metaphor for something else, etc.?)

but at what point does a mark cease to be just a mark and become something else? i don't think this question ever really goes away because "that point" is always shifting depending on culture and the individual's point of view.

if the simplest form of an image is line, than the closest natural form to a line that i can think of is a branch. a branch is easily represented by a line. so, if this argument holds, then at what point is a representation of a branch no longer seen as a branch, but only as a line?

maybe this is a ridiculous question, but it brings up something for me that is somehow essential to the way humans experience the world.

and again, it's somehow very awkward. how nature can become human action is a strange phenomenon.

so, back to the branch/line thing. if that transition is found between branch and line, or gesture, what happens? it seems that there's a very narrow grey area where these very different things are each other, where nature is human action. so, what does this say about a tree, which seems to exist independent from ourselves? i guess it's the classic "if a tree falls in the woods" question (does it make a sound?). does the tree exist apart from our awareness of it?

but i'm more interested in what we as humans do rather than what we think. i give primacy to action over thought, because thought means nothing without entering the world, which requires action. and there's no doubt that what we do as individuals and as a culture creates our realities.

so this means that humans have a lot of power at our disposal. an extreme and probably unimaginable amount of power. this scares me. it means we're capable of literally anything. that "anything" can be life-giving or destructive.

and yet a rose is a rose is a rose.

How to Tackle the Thorny Issues

Yard Sale

the easy unstoppable nature of change

i think it's important to come to terms with the transience of living without it depressing us. it's the impermanence and unpredictability that makes life not only worth living, but tolerable. absolute certainty is a menace, and aspiring to this makes us disbelieve our dreams.

golden mean variations