After the last hive has collapsed / flowers will be poems / Composed entirely stills

             When read aloud
it reminds me of that time we saw
             silent films

accompanied by
             Her breathing was
a rustling of tenses, underground
Movements have become
citable in all their moments
With my nondominant hand
             I want to give
in a minor key
             the broadest sense


-excerpt from the poem Doppler Elegies, from Ben Lerner's book, "Mean Free Path"

shit!

<3 LOVE <3

<3 LOVE <3

<3 LOVE <3

Gavin Bunner - Police Line Up (11 panels, gouache and sharpie on paper) 2011

Oscar Tauzon

Oscar Tuazon - I think of this world as a blank sheet of paper (laminated safety glass) 2010

 

 Oscar Tuazon - I think of this world as a blank sheet of paper (detail) (laminated safety glass) 2010

i give artist lead tours at the MCA and as of recently i have been starting with the gallery that contains Oscar Tauzon's (pronounced TOO-i-zon) work. on a sheet of torn paper, i ask the students to list some of their immediate responses as well as the observations and connotations that they have after viewing the work for a few minutes. i like to start with this gallery of work because it is really affective - and it is hard not to have a response. some of the responses are:

dark, broken, sketchy, sad, gloomy, terrifying, destroyed, ruins, scary, depressing, angry, crime scene, warehouse, construction site, horror movie, fighting, alley, bomb, destruction, disaster.

Oscar Tuazon - I gave my name to it (steel plate and fluorescent lamps) 2010

based on the group's observations, we often end up talking about disasters. Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Japan, earthquake in Haiti, 9/11, and other references are the norm. occasionally we touch on my response to this this work: that i see these works as a physical manifestation of our (my) fear of Armageddon. to me, it seems to speak to the faults and ephemeral nature of the world we have constructed for ourselves. nothing seems strong, sturdy, permanent, or even enough. walls crumble, windows shatter, the lights fall and go out, and our attempts to stop these events will never be enough. in Tauzon's work i see the global-warming-based fear that has been keeping me up at night and driving much of my work as of recent.

Oscar Tuazon - Bottom Dollar (wood, canvas, metal, and plastic) 2011

i would also like to note that it was 80° today - March in Chicago has an average high of 45° and a low of 28°. they say la niña, but it's still scary to me. people downtown this morning were wearing everything from shorts and sandals to winter coats: like they could will the weather to return to what it should be.

 Oscar Tuazon - A burnt sheet of paper with burnt words on it (concrete) 2011

money, health, & art

a lineage of images on health & my work from past year:

screen capture of my purchased health insurance plan (catastrophe insurance)

an x-ray of my teeth, after my abscessed tooth was removed (more on that experience here)

tree/stump in England which people have hammered coins into for good luck

 

detail of the above stump

 i pick up lucky pennies, and keep them in my left pocket till they are no longer lucky

Adam Farcus - Lucky Pennies (lucky pennies, wood, glue, and shellac) 2012 [for the Octagon open house]

 Lucky Pennies (detail)

text from "Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft" that detail the healing powers of colors and how to charge water with colors

Adam Farcus - Charge (jars, lighting gels, tape, water, US dollar coins, bricks, and light) 2011

Charge (detail)

| | | | | | | | \\// & luck

came across both of these at the Art Institute today. also, they're moving the Cy Twombly sculptures to what was the Robert Ryman Elliot Room - i'm excited to see them in new light (figuratively and literally).

a guy taking notes - probably on how his vest shares formal qualities with Ellsworth Kelly's work

water, dirt, coins (US, Mexican, Euros, and some others), car keys, and a battery - on the leading top edge of the terrace-walk between the Modern Wing and Millennium Park. amazing - i will go back in a day or 2 with a better lens, i think this is a piece [the photo]

gdfsw

The Anatomy Lesson is so famously overexposed, so crusted over with conventional regard, as to be almost impossible to see afresh. And indeed, when I recently came upon the painting once again, rather than seeing it I found myself recalling an essay I hadn't thought about in almost thirty years -- the English critic John Berger's 1967 rumination on the occasion of Che Guevara's death. Responding to the simultaneous appearance seemingly all over the world of that ghastly photo of Che's felled body, stretched out half naked across a bare surface and surrounded by the proud Bolivian officers and soldiers who had succeeded in bagging the revolutionary leader, Berger made a startling connection to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson.
- from An Anatomy Lesson: Looking at Rembrandt between sessions of the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, by Lawrence Weschler, 1997.

Borrowing the sentiments of Berger and Weschler, the following images demonstrate a visual continuation of aesthetic qualities. The list/collection was created by going to Google image search, punching my keyboard ("gdfsw" was generated), and hitting search. I then took one image and entered that into Google's new "search by image" function. I did this for each consecutive image. The result is a lineage of image searches that, initially, would seem like they are only formally related. As I see it, the interesting part of this exercise is the relationships and juxtapositions that occur.

convergence: google meets Weschler

i took this image and put it into the new google "search by images" function

then i selected "visually similar images" and got this selection of images (this is only the 1st page and 1/2):

crazy
(Weschler's Convergence)