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Already missing what I'm not looking for

3/29/2013

This week's clippings, destined for my over-stuffed sketchbook.

I’m addicted to Google Images and I’m not happy about it.

For the last several decades, most of my ideas have come from markings on wood pulp, specifically newspapers. And even though it’s now becoming almost unconscionable to sacrifice trees for the purpose of disseminating information, we’re missing out on something in the loss of the traditional newspaper format.

We’re missing an element of randomness and surprise that comes from scanning the sheets of a good newspaper full of a wide range of engaging opinion and well-researched, original subject matter. When we're used to flipping through the pages numerically, we come across whole areas of information that we're not looking for.

For most of my adult life this has involved a routine of morning coffee, three or four daily newspapers, the sharing of sections, and a lot of bitching over what’s missing from stories or the paper. It ends with tearing out a few items to share with others or add to my over-stuffed sketchbook, then bringing the stack of papers downstairs to drop on a neighbour’s doormat.

It all sounds so quaint now, and we’re fighting the losing battle to get our content without plunking screens down at the kitchen table. In fact, anecdotal evidence tells me that the rise of new media over tactile media has all but eclipsed the whole breakfast-table routine.

Newspapers were my entry point into an early understanding of public art, the global art market and art history. I would never have any awareness of the issues under those categories if I had solely relied on new media and its format of reading by topic. That method will instantly get me to what I’m looking for, but I won’t get what I’m not looking for.

I’m already mourning the stimulating visual experience of opening up the paper to a clutter of photos and fonts, opinions and statistics. I’m still clutching on to the clipping habit, still passing around pieces of paper, but I’m also getting sucked into art aggregators like Colossal and Collacubed.

The Day After, 2008. Newsprint, canvas, acrylic medium.

Above and right: Two of my artworks that weave together the visual, tactile and literal elements of newspapers.

Deadlines, 2008. Newsprint, canvas, acrylic medium.

But the research randomness I crave is seductively being serviced by Google Images. Now, thanks to its new aggregating software, any image that I search includes a series of visually related options. No more walking to the newspaper boxes. No more sharing. No waiting.

We used to wait for it
Now we're screaming ‘Sing the chorus again!’

(Click the arrow below to hear the song that says it all)

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Over-thinking will be the death of me

3/22/2013

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My biggest obstacle is over-thinking — not to be confused with big thinking. Over-thinking is my umbrella term for all the second-guessing, the predicting, the analyzing and the re-thinking that can turn my mind into a maelstrom. It's unproductive and it's exhausting and it's why I and many of my maker friends are involved in repetitive, obsessive (I prefer the term "devotional") artwork methods. The focus required is just the ticket to get out of the rabbit's hole of circular thinking. Less mental chatter, more mindfulness.

Making is the key to learning for me. As the work takes shape I try to make out what it's saying, where it's situated in the whole art discourse thingy. It's clear that I have to be clear about my intentions, where I'm going with all this, and why. Some thought is necessary.

But over-thinking is a form of self-sabotage and it has threatened the existence of my latest project, Monumental Doily. As I hook into those strands I find myself grasping at threads from my art history and cultural theory classes, trying to work in ideas of power struggles and psychoanalysis. Next thing you know I'm assuming the posture of German artist-shaman/renegade educator/former Nazi militiaman Joseph Beuys, in some sort of feminist response to his famous 1974 performance art piece, I Like America and America Likes Me (below, left) until my Inner Victorian Grandlady cries, "Enough nonsense!" (She would never say, "I call bullshit!")

This is usually the point where I have to fight the urge to scrap the whole project and herein lies the conflict.

I have to be able to speak about my work but I have a pretty low tolerance for too much artspeak. I like artwork that has me at Hello, that hooks me in to investigate further and is not just some in-joke designed for the rarified few who have had the benefit of art-historical education.

It should evoke a wide range of responses from a wide range of viewers — 'multiple points of entry', as they say. It should resonate in different ways and over time, and not rely on an instruction manual disguised as an artist statement full of exclusionary academic language (unless the point of the artwork is to create a feeling of alienation). Yet if it's too definitive, it's over quickly, like a trick, and I'm done. Next!

Elitism is ugly and I really do agree with Beuys' belief that everyone is an artist, or at least can be if she would just shut out the rational jibber-jabber already and hook into the emotional/spiritual, the unquantifiable, even the unreasonable. (Beuys' beautiful mind is behind his urban intervention project, 7000 Oaks)

Sometimes a giant doily is just a giant doily, material evidence of one person's attempt to connect in an increasingly chaotic, hectic, overly-quantified and unrationally rationalized world.

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Art that has tongues wagging is working

3/15/2013

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A few weeks back, one of the local dailies ran a staff photo of a grumpy-looking woman wearing a hand-drawn sign around her neck that read: “Mount Pleasant needs a pool not a poodle on a pole.”

God, I miss the newsroom sometimes. When that kind of photo lands on your desk (so to speak) you do a little happy dance. This is the money shot, the hook into a hot little story, the art that guarantees the front page of a community paper. And the alliteration in the scrawled sentiment doesn’t hurt either.

It's the kind of story that has the community buzzing, the phones ringing, the (e-)letters pouring in. It has, as they say, legs. It promises follow-up stories with new angles, fresh emotions. It fends off the greatest fear for an understaffed newsroom: crickets. (Watch how a CTV news story adds fuel to the fire.)

Successful public art does the same thing. Love it or hate it, it gets people talking, debating, engaging. As I write this the tweets for #MainStPoodle have neared 1,000 since the pooch made the papers. (My December post on the freshly erected poodle is here.)

It's all grist for the mill for those on the media sidelines but now that I'm out from behind the desk and in the rejection-rich realm of art-making, I wonder how the poodle-producer, Montreal artist Gisele Amantea, feels about people griping over the seven-foot-tall porcelain pooch’s $97K price tag. How does any public-art-maker, for that matter, not feel at least a little wounded by the slings and arrows launched against their own creative expression? An opinion piece in a newspaper is tomorrow's fish-wrap (it sounds archaic even as I write it) but public art endures. It could torment the critics for decades; the criticism could torment the artist for life.

New York City artist Dennis Oppenheim’s 1997 public artwork, Device to Root Out Evil installed in Coal Harbour was never intended to be permanent but plenty of Vancouverites squawked that the piece known as the 'upside-down church' was “sacrilegious” or worse: view-hampering. But does an artist of that international stature have all the steely resilience to chalk up the chatter to 'community engagement'?

(Above: photo by Papalars)

I wonder because I felt that pang of rejection as I was photo-documenting the installation of Crossover, the scramble-style four-way crosswalk in Steveston in 2011. My design was an attempt to weave together the history of the Japanese net-makers and the modern-day marine flavour of this corner of the Lower Mainland using a simple, enduring motif. I was not prepared for the few individuals who showed up while I was snapping photos, griping at anyone within earshot that this was a colosal waste of taxpayers' dollars, not to mention a safety hazard. (I'm not so resilient that I could resist following up on the hazard part and I'm relieved to learn it's a safety improvement.)

The other day an artist friend who had to return to the salaried workplace said she never realized how much rejection she had to deal with as a full-time working artist. I'm starting to see that this business ain't for sissies.

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The art of designing beyond the outdorky

3/8/2013

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I'm not a sports person. Elementary-school Sports Day was an annual hell. But the bike-decorating portion, now that was my kind of competition. Even today I get choked up when I catch a glimpse of that one artsy kid in a community event proudly parading a bicycle with crepe paper woven through the spokes, homemade fringes on the handlebars.

Cycling and creative work go together. It's the mode for many artists, either out of financial necessity or personal resolve to think outside the car. The bike has been referenced and re-worked in staggeringly imaginative ways, all over the world. But during my daily ride to the studio, when my morning brain gets into gear, or on my way back home, when my aching parts get some easy physical release and my lungs some fresh air, I often think about what would make biking a little less...outdorky. Especially in the sog. Or the dark. Which at this time of year has people screaming, Enough already with the soggy dark!

I'm not talking about the usual raingear and lights and reflectors — although there are some new innovations that are making it all a helluva lot easier, like Mountain Equipment Co-op's rechargeable, quick-release bike light — but gear that will actually attract people to embrace workday cycling. We've got the bike lanes and the sensible equipment; now we need to add a little form to all that function so we can jump off our bikes and into the workplace as seamlessly as if we were getting out of a bus or car. We need to get past the clacking bike shoes, mushroom helmets, and day-glo hazard vests. If it takes more time to look half-way presentable at a meeting over coffee than consuming that cup of coffee, it's a deal-breaker.

Bike shop in Altlandsberg, Germany. Photo from copenhagenize.com

Designers know there's a demand for taking an aesthetic approach to daily cycle-commuting, in both the bike and the clothing. 'Cycle chic' is going mainstream, thanks to folks like Mikael Colville-Andersen and his Cycle Chic Manifesto that includes the vow: "I embrace my responsibility to contribute visually to a more aesthetically pleasing urban landscape."

I'm not deluded enough to assume I'll ever look chic on a bike but I am still jonesing for a black flocked equestrian helmet. I'm also waiting for some designer to come up with waterproof knee-high riding boots — maybe neoprene? — that meet up with a black flared knee-length waterproof shell coat with embedded reflective motifs. Giant mums would be nice, on the back and sides that appear when hit with headlight beams and streetlights. Others might prefer a bio-hazard motif or the ubiquitous skull.

Photo from hovding.com

Not so crazy, when you compare these designy dreams to the Hovding, the prototype of an inflatable helmet that follows the same technology of an airbag and looks like a cowl scarf. Yes, it's a one-time use item, and yes, it's over $400, but in my lifetime of on-and-off cycle commuting, my helmet has never been put to the test (touch wood). And the Hovding includes 'black box' technology that can record evidence of crash. (See it in action, and the fashion-conscious Swedish designers, below:)

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Waiting to be inspired by hoardy pile of plastic

3/1/2013

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My not-quite-resolved plastic quilty test.

I’ve been left high and dry, marooned by a foul waste stream — a particular category of non-recycled stuff that ends up in Vancouver’s landfill.

This category consists of many boxes of rigid-plastic toy bits that my nephews leave in their wake of play. I nabbed the lot a couple of years back because I loved their indeterminate shapes, their hot colours, their embedded culture. The big plan was to turn these remnants of their childhood into a scrap-quilty, uh, thing. I never really did have a sharp objective for the objects.

But that was before I embarked on my Great Leap Forward Toward More Space campaign in January. Now the toy detritus is the last of my hoardy habit left to face down.

I’ve done the math and have realized that the number of hours required to explore and execute the various art projects that involve all these bits encroaching on my living space probably exceeds my estimated lifespan. But I have another reason for not wanting to part with the toy parts: no one accepts them for recycling in these parts, as dude at the Recycling Hotline (604-732-9253) informed me. All non-numbered rigid plastic junk is just chucked into the landfill where they will stay intact pretty much forever.

Photo of artist/designer Adrian Draigo from www.draigo.com.

There is another option, he said; I could drive the stuff to a monthly drop-off location in another community set up by Pacific Mobile Depots, pay $7 per big bag to take it all away for use in some plastic-lumber business down the road, or I can pay $30 to arrange a pick-up. It’s a service that is probably used by a tiny minority of households —a tiny drop of effort in the plastic tsunami.

Meanwhile, the quandary is major: Until our governing bodies stop acting like whipping boys to the global petroleum industry and start regulating against the sale of non-recyclable plastic products, we’re all left to either try to make use of the stuff that’s piling up around us or stuff it into the earth.

Many designers have put the glut of a particular waste stream to good use, creating ingenious upcycled products. London-based artist Adrian Draigo, for example, creates lighting using bottle caps — another plastic reject from most recycling programs — and LED lights. The low-energy, ambient 'Glo' light can be hung anywhere, literally highlighting the issue of this ubiquitous waste product.

It’s a new spin on the old ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ axiom, except the need that drives this innovation is not in the resulting use-object but in reducing garbage. The key to this — and every —upcycling project is creating an object that people want, otherwise it’s just waste transformed.

My urge to use the throwaways falls more within the need to visually express short-sighted (at best) and greed-driven (more likely) global production-consumption actions. The motivation to make my scrappy sculpture starts from medium and works toward idea rather than the other way around. This compulsion to dream up an idea in order to make use of the bits feels overly opportunistic, and it's why I remain in option-paralysis over whether to keep it to maybe one day use it or let it all go. That's what happens when you're confronted by this plastic problem.

photo from www.core77.com

UK artist Stuart Haygarth made good use of what showed up in his environment with his iconic “Tide” chandelier. The suspended sphere is fabricated from the plastic that washed up on a particular stretch of the Kent coastline.

The work makes it impossible not to think of the giant garbage patches swirling around the planet.

For more on that staggering reality, hit this Ted Talk:

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Already missing what I'm not looking for

Over-thinking will be the death of me

Art that has tongues wagging is working

The art of designing beyond the outdorky

Waiting to be inspired by hoardy pile of plastic

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