Art that Invades My Dreams (September 19, 2023)
I am interested in art that invades my dreams:
Things that, whether you like it or not, invade your subconscious, things that sway what you make, if only just a little bit, by immersing themselves in your thoughts, from either the direct encounter with the work, or from simply the image. What is remembered of the work subconsciously is not the work itself nor the image, but “...the main course, where the viewing experience is simply the hors d'oeuvres.” It is in this state that art is the most potent. It is not the work itself or the image of the work that has power, but the reverberations of the initial encounter.
“…it is impossible to suppress the memory of an image.”
“A brief encounter is the most beautiful encounter that exists.” - Michel Majerus on the work of Sigmar Polke, 1997
For that is where art thrives! Brief encounters that we think back upon while we make our top ramen back at our apartments.
When thinking about what I’m interested in in regards to painting, objects, or installation, I find that I am drawn most towards earnest making. The kind of making that is in itself serious by its own effort or conviction- that is not to say self serious art which usually comes into being by deep academic insight into what art wants out of you, not what you want to give art, but art that simply in its own pursuit of coming into being is all very serious- trying so hard to get something exactly how you wish it to be embeds work with some type of, for lack of the better word, soul. Things that do not rely on any type of skill as the main entry, but some other type of scrappy human questioning. I have found that the artists I find myself completely confounded by and deeply interested in, have rarely, if ever, been called talented. Talent in relation to skill is something I have very little interest in.
In my own work I do not have the ego strength to do things simply because I want to do them, I have to weasel my way into painting or installation or object making. I have to find some type of form that makes my own artistic pursuits seem worthwhile without relying on skill or craft. Once I have found this wedge within the surface, I can feel free within my own practice to honestly create whatever I wanted to create in the first place. This is not a fault, simply a way in which I found I have to work. I think I am drawn to work that takes this approach of moving “…fruitfully sideways…” (Schjeldahl, 2017), a method that has its own reasons that only make sense to the artist. Methods that cannot be made to need to exist in the natural way of wanting art to exist.
In reference to artistic legacies, I owe very much to the history of early post minimalists such as Ree Morton and Richard Tuttle, as well as to conceptual painters such as Mary Heilmann, Jutta Koether and Karen Kilimnik. However, growing up in a small town in Texas I had little access to art other than through a place called Webb Gallery, where I lived half a mile away. The Webbs’ gallery specialized in what we call Outsider Art as well as contemporary artists from across the country, all with a certain thread of warmth and honesty. They were the ones who told me that leaving the state to go to college is something I could actually do, as well as the ones who told me about Parsons.
I am deeply interested in these contemporary practices of painting and art making, but the basis of my deep love of art is in art environments in which the Webbs discovered and took care of as well as artists that worked outside of the canon of contemporary art who the Webbs represented. The art they made or environments they installed were completely interlinked with each other and how they lived. Separation of painting, objects, installation and life never occurred to either the Webbs or any of their artists working within or without the canon.
I learned when I moved to New York in 2019 that people are always trying to figure everything out. Trying to find a linguistic reason why anyone does anything, or why anyone makes any kind of choice. What drew me to art, in the first place, was its non-linguistic ambiguity. Not knowing why you like something or dislike something or are confused by something. Trying to work through what you find interesting.Trying to figure something out, the reasons behind something, is a coastal thinking, or a north eastern coastal thinking. The south west is a place where things can be incomprehensible, the landscape (ever receding), the geologic calendar (seemingly infinite), the clouds (incessantly drifting). Myths are not questioned and life does not have to have reason or have to be fair. The south west is cradled in celestial care while simultaneously being rocked into direct inexhaustible loneliness. When looking at the full scope of the night sky in Texas, it is hard to separate these feelings of cosmic belonging and utter isolation. One’s direct knowledge of their own scale when they see the entire expanse of landscape and the ever milky blackness of the complete solar system.
How then does one within art provide these two great goals: to provide a signal to message to people that they are indeed not alone, and to create things that language cannot simply express. Creating a type of milky blackness, a void that simultaneously comforts and questions, that isolates and consoles. To create a community of other people interested in this non-linguistic ambiguity. For art to enter through your eyes, brain and body- and dare I say soul.
The way I work is like shooting a confetti cannon into a room every day for a month or so, then sweeping it all into organized piles, trying to figure out what goes where and what looks good here and what looks cool there.
Sometimes I do not want to be the one who sweeps things up, maybe that's where writing comes in, my own or maybe the writing of others.
“What if we thought of the goddess Iris instead of Hermes, Iridescence instead of Hermeneutics.” - Amy Sillman
On Jutta Koether, 2023
“Create a language, use the language, then make fun of people in your language when they start using your language.” - Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
Natalie and I are technically the godparents of Ziggy Abraham Rubenstein Head. This started when Natalie started to work for Adrianne Rubenstein who needed help in her studio as well as with her new born child. Natalie and I both went in for the interview expecting both of us to be employed less than part time, me as more of a studio manager and art handler, and Natalie as a caretaker for Ziggy. During the interview it became abundantly clear that Natalie was more qualified to do both duties, therefore she got both jobs. This led to me getting a job with the artist Al Freeman sewing naugahyde into large soft sculptures, making sure not to impale her beige French bulldog when he lunged at me full force while I cut material on the ground.
That aside, Natalie takes care of Ziggy during the day while Adrianne is at the studio and Jake, Adrianne’s partner and Ziggy’s father, is teaching. Ziggy looks as if he is our offspring, he has brown eyes and dark hair like Natalie and is oddly tall for his age and has curls like me. We tote him around downtown in either his baby bjorn or his shearling lined pram, waving to friends across busy intersections, miming that he is not our real child.
One of our favorite things to do with our decoy baby is to go to galleries and act like a young rich artist family. To be young and to have a child in New York means that you are wealthy enough to pay for preschool, therefore you must have a good income, and if you’re an artist with a good income, it is hard to divorce that from the idea that you are a good artist. We love ringing the bell so that they have to let us in, pram and all. From time to time the director of the gallery will come out and talk to us, directing us to the backroom and asking if we would like sparkling or still water in bottle form. Through this decoy baby maneuver, Natalie and I have seen some of the best art hidden from the plebians of the average gallery visitor, beautiful Thomas Schutte maquettes, deep cut Cady Noland cutouts and other random things from artists we have never heard of. A momentary ascension, or miming of a momentary ascension of class that is granted to few outside of the art making profession.
One day Natalie was in Ziggy-Baby-Bjorn mode which means we can go see shows that do not have elevator access. We walked up the silver staircase into Reena Spaulings that day to see a show by the German painter Jutta Koether with the knowledge that my roommate had been deeply obsessed with the diptychs, but little else. I had finished the new Kippenber ger biography that was written by Susanne Kippenberger, but still had not touched the post-war-German-painting Kool Aid to which I was soon to guzzle down.
The show, entitled eVEryTHinG WilL ChaNGe consisted of 19 new works, all oil on canvas. Ranging from diptychs and triptychs on eight by ten inch canvases to larger works that measured seventy eight and three quarters by fifty nine inches. When you are with a baby in a gallery you realize that your time is limited, so your eyes start to see things in a way that thinks about how little time you have to look. I initially saw how cheap the quality of the small canvases were, pre gessoed and chalky with thin abbreviated strokes in Koether’s signature red tones. Like closeups of organs, or alien instruments, these smaller canvases offer themselves as cutouts of larger images that cannot be conceived as a whole. Without any type of sensicle system other than it looks as if Koether had made them. They do not drift towards pattern and decoration, or sculptural painting, but something completely bizarro and other. With stroke qualities between a calligrapher and a patron of somewhere such as Paint and Pour, Koether proves that there is indeed no such rules in painting, all is up for grabs, even if it is grabbed and used in a way that is not that of value within painting as a whole. Koether paints like the last person in the world, licking the plate clean and not leaving any scrap of technique for future generations to appropriate. She simultaneously starts from scratch and finishes the sentence. The painter Eric Palgon later told me that Koether had told him while he was studying under her in Frankfurt that “...she only owned one plate, one fork, one spoon and one knife. That’s all you need.”
By the time we had made one lap of the small gallery, without any acknowledgement from the staff, Ziggy had woken up and emitted a squawk, marking the end of our viewing time. We left swiftly to go across the street to Seward park where we both got iced coffees and Ziggy had his bottle of formula.
The show closed a few days later without either of us being able to see the paintings again, and soon our memory of that day was boiled down to the fact that we felt incredibly uncool and unwanted in that space.
Weeks later I came upon a talk that Koether gave at Dia about Agnes Martin. I was shocked. How did Dia- the most uppity gate keepers of contemporary art- give this oddball the opportunity to talk? I soon found my jaw on the floor seeing that Koether had started her lecture with a dubstep remix of Rihanna’s Where Have You Been. At this moment I realized her true brilliance. I had been searching in the dark trying to name the flavor in which these bizarre paintings fit, to realize that they fit nowhere. Like salt on watermelon, red wine with orange Fanta, the visual information that Koether strong-arms into the world are keys to nothing- questions to nothing as well- but with their absence we would be lacking something that we would not know how to replace properly.
The painter Annie Louise Goldman once when talking about a tube of lead white oil paint described it as ropy. What this means I do not fully understand, a trick of the trade that is saved for those who commit their lives to oil paint, however I can assuredly say that Koether’s paintings are perhaps the antithesis of whatever this ‘ropy’ means. The tensions that she creates within brushstrokes snap and dissipate into themselves, leaving the surface incredibly light, like standing up too quickly out of a hot bath.
Compositionally the works become even odder puzzles to swallow. Little pieces of kale that stay in your teeth. There is obviously a consistency of color and brushes and textures, ranging from -it seems- only a few brushes and five or six colors used per canvas. The symbols have a similar kind of limitation, however the abstractness becomes even more apparent. Jewels, hearts, vines, flowers, airplanes and of course grapes are the technical forms that are used formally to create forms and expanses that radiate. Each canvas starting from square one within these restraints to create tensions that mash into one another in a way similar to bumper cars, needed for the game to exist.
Koether has given me many things I cannot name, not because they are secret, but because they are non-linguistic. Feelings that cannot be translated directly to English. Maybe there is a word in Icelandic or Portuguese that could describe precisely what is happening, but until I learn both of those languages I will have to take what I feel directly and that may just be the joy of coming into contact with an artist who has done in some way what I wish I could do, what I hope to do.
Studio Notes
Kristal
Woodrow Bean Transmountain Drive
Plankton and clouds, mountians
cell phones and ghosts
I can only snap when the weather's right
-Bridget
Burger King gate
Double Infinite Honey
Occasional pond
Choke holded... choke held
Golf Ball Worm Hole
Stream of Consciousness Construction
Dropped Pollock
Encaustic Kitchen
Never be hungry in a foreign country
Dog Food Wallet
A case for nourishing painting
Art that enters through your eyes, brain and
mouth
Art that your body reacts to directly
Art that refers to your body, not your
head
Wade Guyton interview
Love Saves the Day book
I
created a planned randomness in which
color
behaved like a star
- Barbara Guest
Maurice merlot ponty cezanne's doubt
I'm a retired troubled youth bad kid
Althusser Schlofsky
the future of nostalgia
Tulsa fellowship
T Fleischmann
Time is a Thing that the body moves
through
I need your love, is that true?
Cafe mutton
Canton clay works
Suzan Matt's one street potters
Ben wolff goshen
Guy Wolff Litchfield
Clay 266
Bailey's
The symbolics Jameison Webster
Choke holded... choke held
Aki onda
Lucy Lippard
John mcfee
Undermining Lucy Lippard
Empty and Full, Chinese painting
The city is ours this city belongs to us
Work retreat center for land use
interpretation
Vella Slava Saint panorama La
Hari Krishna animatronic Krishna
Lauren eisley
Don cherry Terry Riley live 1971 in Sweden
Hamtranic Ceramic
Love Saves the Day book
Stefan Mallarme poet
The fold and the baroque
Suzanne Hudson Robert Ryman
Loe Fuller
Witch Dance Mary Wigman
Tony Fahrer
Monster Chatwin
Braiden Baer
Mance Lipspcomb
Irma Vepp
Let the right one in
Near Dark
CORE program Houston
The Sandburg institute
The Miracle Nutrition hour Hardy White
Ben Sanders BArs
Most contemporary artist critics, from Mel
Bochner and Donald Judd to Jutta Koether
and Frances Stark, have turned to writing as
a way to survey the terrain before them and,
often, to clear a path for their art.
Richard Wentworth
Saffner saffner Niels
Skaftfell
Myron Stout Denton
Alberto Bury
Meeks cut off
Kenneth Goldsmith
Cheryl Donegan
Robert Buck
Fergus Fahili
David Quadrini
Engstrom gallery
Pythagorean UFO restaurant Sugarland
Ryan Chronic Designs
Coffee cup house
Miro Triptych Matthew Collins
Art on my mind bell hooks
If you're in conversation their concerns
become yours and vice versa
The color green in the art work of Richard
Tuttle
Sewing seeds in the desert
Angle of repose
Studio Notes (August 21, 2023)
Creating new information is the greatest pleasure in life, the second greatest is being around new information that you like, to talk about that new information with the person who made the information.
I think one of my biggest fears is that everyone is going to forget me, or forget about me. I don’t know what my tie to immortality is, maybe I was brought up around so much mortality that I thought I was past it. My parents would talk about bodies and people’s health as if it were something that were normally discussed, like mechanics discussing new models and broken car parts. PErhaps its because everyone else in my family is in the pursuit of impacting people directly, of helping people survive the world burning, to live a better life. Both of my parents have saved I don't know how many lives, and my brother is busy creating theorems or systems to help people make ethical investments. I on the complete other hand have made it my duty, apparently, to make my life extremely self fulfilling. It is then, in essence, my fault if I do not achieve happiness or contentment, or ecstatic joy.
While I know that it is always one’s own pursuit and responsibility in a way, why do I feel even more weight on myself recently?
Is it something that everyone feels? Everyone experiencing this thing at the same time? Who knows. Maybe this is something that only I can think while I’m typing with my laptop on the top of my naked legs while I sit on my found couch in my apartment, alone on a Sunday night in August. I unplug my air conditioning to plug in my computer and decide that this kind of typing makes me feel less alone. Some kind of output that would make me feel cleansed in a way, like purging the entire bottle of wine that you decided to drink with your college friends in the dorm. Except this one doesn't make me feel as terrible afterwards, and while I’m not woozy, just alone and slightly getting warmer while the AC is off because my computer is still plugged in. Will I ever enter some type of escalator that will make people remember me? Will college kids ever watch grainy film footage of me driving in an RV in the northeast with my friends. Footage from some type of creative exploration trip. Some type of “We didn’t know what we were doing then, we were just kids, but little did we know what we would later do.” or some type of shit like that. Some type of nostalgic saccharinity that only people who experienced success in mid life can say of their youth.
“not the cover of the novel but the novel itself.” (Chinati, von Heyl, 2008)
Studio Notes (August 18, 2023)
I like how Katz’ delicatessen feels like the inside of a roadhouse in the southwest
I like the feeling of the part of Dazed and Confused where they're in the field with the moon tower
I like the feeling of warm wind on a summer night through the windows of a car that is slowing down to go around a curve
I like the feeling when a photograph is perfectly in focus accidentally
I like how the lights in dim sum go go are perfectly LED
It reminds me of the kitchen in on Luke Skywalker’s uncle’s homestead
I like the feeling of when you park on the side of the road and you have to step into the ditch on the side of the road and it’s
lower than you think it is.
I like the feeling of a winter day that is extremely bright but also overcast, how the light just slowly dims at the end of the
day until it’s blue then black.
I like the feeling when I walk through a lot of grass and don’t feel itchy
I like the feeling of the light quality that I can only imagine happens in Scandinavia
I like the humidity that can only exist in stone buildings
I like the feeling of waking up very early and going outside immediately
I’m talking around five minutes after your eyes open
I like artists who get so much in their own lane that they start to make their own trail, so obsessed with their specific
something that it is refreshing to check back in with them regularly to see how far down the rabbit hole they’ve gone. To
see what things they’ve come up with, what conclusions only they could draw. I do not care to keep up with these artists
minute by minute, rather it is better to peek into their mind only momentarily once in a while. To perhaps not like what
they are making, but to trust them. To be intrigued by their mind first, to look at their work and maybe not understand it,
think about the work for a while, then come to a conclusion that maybe changes how one looks at things.
The goal is for the art to invade the dream, not the appetite.
Artist who are like this are: Rachel Harrison, Carroll Dunham, Charline von Heyl, Seth Price, David Hammonds, Amy
Sillman, Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, Chris Martin, Isa Genzken, Laura Owens, Roni Horn, Bruce Nauman, Lucas
Samaras, Josef Strau, Joe Bradley, Aria Dean, Monika Baer, Paul Chan, Scott Reeder, Ian Page, Mike Kelley,
Studio Notes (August 12, 2023)
I and you are interchangeable in this manifesto
Making art is like caring for a pitbull puppy, some people love it and want to talk about it, while others will instantly be scared and critical
There needs to be more critique for boring decisions
There needs to be more critique for using beige
Separating your taste from your art is like making a skyscraper earthquake proof
There are three things that an artist can do with art
Make art, talk about art, sell art
You can only do one at a time
If you talk about art and sell art, then youre a gallerist
If you just talk about art, you’re a theorist
If you just make art, you are an artist
That is the only clarification
I should be the last person who gives a definition of art
I will gladly give a definition of art that I care about
Earnest art to the front of the line
Honesty is the quality
Weirdness too
I want to be confused by what I’m doing
Josh Smith said: “I want to make something that I don’t like, but I want to keep”
This is a true motor for an artistic practice
I don’t want to explain away what I do
Throw a few bones of what the people want to hear then get a really good writer to write about your work
I should be the last person who knows what I’m doing
Create a language, use the language enough for people to start using the language, then make fun of those people in your language for using your language
If I do what I truly want to do I will not be derivative
Even if I am
Be friends with artists whose work you like
Be friends with artists whose work you don’t like
Be friends with writers
Context is important but not that important
You can do whatever you want
My friend Hannah Beerman has a drawing in her apartment that says “Painting = Freedom Machine”
Date a writer
Date a photographer
If they’re both a writer and a photographer, then you should never leave that person
Safeguard your time for making
There needs to be more critique for artists who have gotten away with making poor art that is based on skill
I don’t care about skill
You can’t keep things moving if you’re interested primarily in skill
I care about honesty
And color sense
Intuition is better than skill
Almost always
Making things is the foundation to being human
And nothing should get in its way
Especially critique
I am incredibly pro-making
I love making things
I am not by any means a pro at making
There should not be a thing called a pro at making things
I am not interested in art that when people see it they are struck by the artist’s
Skill, history, talent, age, budget, price etc, etc
I have never been interested in artists that people think are talented
Talent is a cheap derogatory term
I am most interested in things that people think are confusing and weird
To come into contact with something you do not understand but you are intrigued by is one of the greatest things in life
I was told one time that I like too many things
I do like a lot of things
I was also told that it is important to know what you hate
To protect yourself from it by stating you do not like it
The greatest thing about being an artist is the power to change your mind
If anything gets in the way of that, it should be cajoled out of your way
An artist should not think about what their work is going to look like above a couch
An artist should think about things like “is it waterproof?”
“Is it too boring?”
An artist should always want to build their own house
An artist should have quiet and loud ways of working
An artist should listen to all kinds of music and not know how to answer the question “what kind of music do you like?”
I don’t care about work that is responding to other artwork
An artist should respond to themselves
Or their friends
I don’t care about institutional critique that is shown in an institution
I don’t care about performance art that is self serious
I don’t care about art that is self serious
I sometimes care about art that is self serious
But only if it’s really good
I care about sweet art
Sweetness isn’t a tool to prove something else
Earnestness isn’t a tool to prove something else either
They can stand by their own as aesthetic and emotional sensations
Art is just new visual information
Or other information
I like the sensorial information the best
Our job as artists is to create new visual information
And that is information that can’t fully be conveyed without art as the passage
Abstract art is the easiest abstract information to gather
Other than music
But could music even count as being abstract
Sounds are still sounds no matter what they are and what they are in relation to
I guess that could be said about paint
But that would be boring to make that assertion
Something someone from an ivy league that hates making things would say
Believing in anything does not matter in art
Believing in nothing does not matter in art
Seeing is the thing that matters
Both believing is seeing and seeing is believing
Duh
At least in art
Not in other things that need an explanation
Again the best thing about being an artist is being able to change your mind
And that means you don’t have to explain yourself
You don’t have to tell your grandma why you’re changing majors
Or your high school friends why you think the town you’re from is sad and getting gross
The explanation is what people are looking for in art
It should never be something provided by the artist
Because that would defeat the entire point
If there even is one
Trying to corral people into the zone of understanding you’re moating is something I don’t know how to do
I just stress myself out about how no one understands me
When will someone ever understand my art the way I want it to be understood?
Probably sometime
Hopefully soon
I guess that’s what keeps thing ‘a movin
The whole fear of not being understood
I guess I can only hope for people to think I’m cool and that I know what I’m doing
And that I can throw a pretty epic dinner party
And that I’m kind and a good friend and blah blah blah
Anyway I hope people think my art is good
Or at least get something from it
Some kind of information that is new and makes them think, at least a little, differently
I think I just want people to trust me
To think that I know what I’m doing
To see that the decisions that I make are decisions only I could have made and that they are interesting
To have people not treat me like a kid
To be deeply honest with people and have them be open to that
And to care about me in a way that is also honest
To not change my voice or cadence in any situation
To be lovably monotone
Maybe lovably mono-voce
To have my writer friends and artist friends to talk to me about art they like and to invite me to museum shows and talk about those museum shows in the cafe of the museum afterwards while we both drink espresso and one of us orders a cookie, the other a sandwich that takes too long. We then go to the museum bookstore and I find something that I I’ve almost bought many times in the past but never seemed to purchase. I’ll look at the cover and tell my artist/writer friend “I think I’m going to buy this.” We’re going to both be wearing sweaters, not having our winter coats back from coat check just yet, and the friend will say, “Yeah! Just do it, you’ve always loved that artist.” We’ll then talk a little bit more about the show then we’ll drive or take the train back to my house where Natalie will be writing something and I tell her that our friend is joining us for dinner. I’ll have to run to the grocery store really quickly to buy a whole chicken to roast in the oven. We’ll have Christmas decorations up and we will soon forget about the museum show and be entrenched in some other kind of aesthetic pleasure that is only brought by warm Christmas light bulbs while we eat our dinner at a circular table. Natalie will ask how the show was and we will both say “Great! One of the best shows I’ve seen this year!” then go back to eating and talking about things that aren’t related to art at all. We’ll finish the meal and sit at the empty table for a couple hours while we drink wine and maybe some type of winter cocktail and eat pecans that my mom shipped me from Texas. At the end of the evening when the friend is putting on their coat they’ll say “I’d love to have you by my studio sometime, I have a bunch of new work for this show in the spring/ I’d love for you to read my new piece I’m working on, I think you’d enjoy it.” I’ll say that I would absolutely love to and pull out my calendar for when I could visit them or pick up the manuscript. We find a date then we hug and they depart.
Studio Notes (August 11, 2023)
Paint things without any plan
Plan somethings on your phone or in a sketchbook
Put things together
Make things sweet and cold
Make things cool and warm
Don’t make things that are cool and cold
or sweet and warm
Unless its with some other things that change the context of the thing
Create worlds that people can enter
But not worlds that people recognize
Make structures and sand them just a little
Try encaustic because it's cool to say
Only paint with oil on canvas if you have to for size reasons
Or if you want to make fun of oil painting
Be interested in the space around the painting as much as the space in the painting
They're not windows, they're weird surfaces
Counters for you to put your keys on
Or pots to plant cactuses in
Paintings should come out and in
I love to be in smooth brain mode when I look at paintings
I like to be in rigid brain mode when I think about how the artist exists in the world
I like to be in rigid brain mode when I think about an artist’s process, not the artist’s images
Color and line should be intuitive
There is no hierarchy of image in my work
I like tromp’loeil for smooth and rigid brain reasons
I want my paintings to look like ice cream cakes
But only in a I-used-to-live-in-Berlin-but-now-I-live-in-Texas kind of way
Earnestness is the best-ness
Paint as part of a system that has its own internal logic
Paint in the same medium in a non-system
Paint romantic paintings
Making art is not about making good art
That’s what I tell myself all the time
But I still kinda wanna be cool
I can’t wear sunglasses without getting self conscience
I don’t get self conscience when I show people a painting I like that I have made
I guess this proves when something is done
When I’m not embarrassed to show it to people, aside from Natalie
She sees everything at all of the stages
I don’t feel self conscience when I wear sunglasses and just she is around
Sunsets are the best
I kind of freak out if I don’t see the sunset at least three times a week during the winter
I like to have a book end to the day
I wish I could have the motivation to watch the sunrise everyday
But I like to stay up really late
So in the morning I like to sleep
Peter Schjeldahl once said that Laura Owens “...had hit on a necessarily willful new direction—not exactly forward, but fruitfully sideways”
I love the term “fruitfully sideways”
I hope to go in that direction
“I like to play with temperature.” my friend the artist Jake Manning told me
There is warm art and cold art
Cold art can be cool and sleek but also soulless
Warm art can be approachable and lovely, but can too quickly be brushed over
Going in between the forms is something I want to do more
Something that perfectly described the balance between what I thought were my most successful works
There’s a difference between ambiguity and confusion
I like ambiguity A LOT
Confusion feels classist and pretentious a lot of the time
I like weird, I don’t like pretentious
Julie Webb told me one time that you spot it you got it when you say something is pretentious
That the idea that something is pretentious is only because you said it was
Therefore you are pretentious
Anyway
Strategic sincerity
Arch skepticism
Those are two things Peter Schjeldahl said too
I like them
A practice should not evolve but spread
An artist’s practice is like a mall for that person to walk around in
If you want to work in a different way, just open a store
The artist will get bored if there is only one store
The artist will get hungry if there is no food court