MAPPING THE CITY

The shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural, nomadic to settled, foraging to sedentary, savage to civilized, tribal to metropolitian was not (is not) either necessary, easy or painless. For this transition to happen, for intelligent apes to be stuffed into clothes and set up in businesses, bureaucracies and book clubs for themselves, systems would have to be erected to prevent their, perhaps inconvenient, nature from destabilizing the City.

The City thus evolved to be as complex as humans. It created a thousand devices to fill out the corners of a square hole that a round peg had been smashed clumsily into.  To push closer together the two parts of the Venn diagram, such that it appeared they fully overlapped.

For fear that they might regress to (or even remember) their uncivilized ways, the City gave them razors, wristwatches, neckties, plumbing, collared shirts, family names, silverware and bookshelves to reaffirm their status as civilized; Domestic creatures nestled snugly between the animals and the angles in the chain of being.

With every protest they could offer, the City would grow to absorb, disassemble, obscure or outright crush the contradiction.  The City gave them marriage to dampen down their lust, and gave them war to tire out their bloodlust. The City gave them sewers to rid them of their filth, and when it could not, gave them medicine to keep them from succuming to it. The City gave them sport and nation to relieve them when they longed again for comfort of the tribe. And when all these yet failed, the City gave them alcohol and sugar to fill in the gaps.

The City is a monument to the triumph of civilization over humanity. Every scenic park, every well furnished apartment, every liquor store, every greasy fingerprint on every door knob, every trashcan, every keyboard, every houseplant, every cigarette butt, every pair of arch supports, every coffee shop, every beggar on every corner, denote this struggle, just as the wrinkles in an ill fitting suit map the mistakes the tailor made when making his measurements. The City becomes then, in all it’s intricacy, complexity and wonder, a detailed map of the battles they have fought, and continue to fight against their host. It contains in code, although never too opaquely, a tally, a record of the crimes committed by the mind against the body.

He collected things with intention: this is not to say he was intentional when he collected things, but that the objects he collected themselves had intention. Objects who had been discarded, repurposed, forgotten and overlooked but had, over their lives, become stubborn, driven, confused, playful, obligated, or wise. Perhaps through some kind of metaphysical osmosis. Creatures of rust and dust and longing and knowing brought together. He built from them families, communities, nations and empires.

Taylor Baldwin is an artist working in sculpture, installation and video. His studio in New York is a small well used room crowded with a some of his collection of found objects, a longboard and pink exercise ball wedged behind the exposed water heater, a Goonies VHS tape, and storage of a few huge paintings by friend and fellow artist Angela Dufresne. All of the aforementioned sitting, marinating in smell of sawdust.

Taylor is tall, energetic, and fiercely intelligent. He is articulate, and speaks with his hands, poking, scraping and clawing (if necessary) at ideas until they reveal themselves. Historically, his work has taken the form of large elaborate sculptures using found objects and materials. His works are labor intensive and reflect his intimate connection to the objects that he works with; their histories, character, function etc. He describes his process as being reactive, “thinking an idea only 40% of the way through before working” in his words. One of his pieces, motherfucker/redeemer, involves a horror movie ready chainsaw, covered in magic-sculpt cactus, all suspended from a chain which is connected to a concrete filled, glass walled casket upon which rests a cardboard replica of the same chainsaw, being crushed by a log. The conceptual aspect of the piece, explained Baldwin, wasn't clear until very far into its construction. He tells the story of struggling to find a way to use this found chainsaw in a series of different projects but never being satisfied. Things came together when this very struggle with the chainsaw itself became the narrative behind the piece. Openness to outcome is central.

This might have been a point of conflict in Taylor’s work; between his non-attachment to intention and his slavish, at times perhaps compulsive work ethic. He embodies a kind of heavy handed devotion in his labor that seems at odds with that more zen attitude of reactivity or receptiveness. Can one be both the mason, tediously stacking heavy bricks that push into the sky to become a mighty cathedral, a triumph of intention over nature, and at the same time be the pure, fluid water that takes the shape of whatever vessel it is poured into? Can one be both the Will and the Willingness?

The answer to this question may be beyond the scope of this post. It may, however, be at the heart of Taylor’s practice, even if it is still shrouded, obscured, muddled or simply waiting to be decoded.

See Taylor’s work here: talyorbaldwinstudio.com

Alas, our venture in New York City has come to an end. Our time here was extremely successful, enjoyable and educational and went by all too fast. 

We will, however, continue to post articles and images about our trip, (including more studio visits, our work, etc.)  regularly over the coming weeks, anticipating our final show of the work we made here at the Leedy Voulkos arts center in Kansas City in the fall. See you on the other side

The Subway: Crowdedness and Loudness. At a certain Point, it becomes Quiet.

  Children: the Point, in Age, at which Cuteness is contrasted with Insanity.

  Fashion: Identity sliding into Caricature.

  Dogs: Dogs become Bears, or, alternatively, Cats.

  The Subway: When is this Person Harmless, lecturing so Aggressively?

  Pet Names: Just the right amount of Condescension, is that it, not too Much?

  The Museum: looking at the Objects, being in the Building, moves back and forth.

  Cat Calls: just a Compliment. just a…?

  Advertising: the Point at which Itself becomes a Parody of Itself.

  Privacy: public Affection is sweet, Diaries intriguing, until suddenly, Please Stop

  Crowds: with a Tribe until one is with Statistics

  Fashion: the cutting Edge into, and back from, Accidents

  The City: the city into The City and back and back and back.

Studio Visit: Marc Handelman

Marc Handelman uses both paint and bookmaking to explore his ideas. To enter, you walk through a hallway full of books and paintings. The experience is like moving through the reference hobbit hole and into the head of Marc Handelman, a space with tables covered in research: numbered color studies, reference photos, books and paintings. It is a place where productivity seems to be inherent because you feel the active pursuit of ideas. It is like finding a book with very precise and inquisitive notes in the margins. 

Marc uses a book to actively test the ways he could create light through color contrasts. Every page was illuminated without the need of gold leaf. Josef Albers would be proud or flabbergasted. Through paint, you can make a surface look backlit, which is an important part of Handelman’s interest in this material. It is not a sketchbook, it is a notebook. 

Through the use of glass, he was able to enhance the ability of paint to reflect light. When you think about it, the technology of a painting exists in reflectivity. Light shines through the paint, and bounces off of the ground. But what if you increase the reflectivity of the surface? By adhering powdered glass to his paintings, Marc improves the backlit quality of his paintings in a way that is not solely mesmerizing. It is connected to his interest in digital light, a part of the painting that is built with at least a month of preliminary research. They take about one day to execute. 

He also showed us his book projects, where he searched through sustainability reports to examine their use of imagery, which can be amazingly repetitive. It highlights the metaphorical structures used by designers to promote the green movement: the same greens, the cleanest water droplets and ambiguous leaves that fell from the clip art tree. His research project is a productive habit: he listens to music and looks through images for hours. It is like taking a scavenger hunt through the data tunnel of the internet. By compiling these images into carefully structured books, he creates an interesting way to highlight trends that are meant for good use but become eerie. You see the way ‘new’ ideas echo themselves. 

Through the use of research and technical strategies, Marc has made for himself a trajectory where the traditional medium of paint can intersect today’s technology. It is like finding a way to make a hatchet cut just as well as a laser beam from the comfort of your garage. 

For more of Marc’s work, visit his website:

http://marchandelman.com/

 “If It’s Not A Mode Don’t Do It” exuberantly hand-written on the wall, a poster of brushstrokes labeled as favorites, an enthusiasm about accidents of translation in the observational process. This is a studio filled to the brim with enjoyment of painting practice.

The variance of iterations of Doyle’s paintings reveals her consideration of time- the dramatic differentiation in both layering/texture and size of the same subject content- even the same composition- is indicative of a differing relationship with the content.

 Doyle explained that the way she paints is focused on particular views that may be observed over a period of time or very quickly- and highlighting those experiences which otherwise slip away. Things like the subway or household objects, seen over and over to the point of not being considered, are depicted equally with momentary or transitory experiences- eating food, noticing small textures on walls, seeing stains or checking one’s phone. By translating both objects and images into paintings, both artist and viewer are made to consider them at greater length. This kind of invited, individual attention is spread from magazines to towels to tortilla chips in a whimsical and inviting fashion.

  The highly textured treatment of paint Doyle uses makes the experience of the painting exude a curiosity about emulation, especially in her sculptural paintings- going as far as canvas draped and then painted thickly like a towel. Her observational paintings give special attention to the physical presence of each object, often using paint thick enough to make them perceptibly protrude from the image- even paintings of paintings, as one of the larger canvases in her studio shows (a comprehensive collection of types of painting, from outsider art to landscape to modernism).

 The tiles, buttons, hairs and wrinkles scattered through her work invite the viewer to spend more time with them, as much as her curiously common subject matter does- phone screens, loading pages, subway stations and bathroom floors. Her enthusiasm about the act of observation and translation is clear and multifaceted, the varieties of which unfold to the viewer more over time– as one imagines the visual minutiae of the everyday unfold to Doyle herself.

fore more:http://hilarydoyle.com/2014

Thirteen sleepless, emerging artists working in multiple disciplines will be opening up their studios to the public (that's you) this Thursday night! From 6pm to 9pm, all of the artists will be present for discussions and performance. One night only, so stop by before the artists are shipped back to the prairie ocean of the midwest. JOIN US 20 Jay St, DUMBO Room 10M 6pm to 9pm From the entrance on Jay Street take the elevator to the Mezzanine (level M), room 10.

Three weeks is a very short period of time to develop a sense of home or familiarity. Pockets of home-ness come not from references to home (there is so much information that such things get buried in sensation) but from accessing places which feel exclusive- intimate.

  By seeking out the hidden or forbidden, one accesses a place where nobody else is- or at the least, one is with others who also had to seek out such a space. A place only functional in its difficulty to find establishes an intimacy of common purpose with the others who arrive there. It is not quite about privacy, as many of the private spaces here (bedrooms, the studios, bathrooms, elevators) are temporarily rented spaces, for hours or minutes, but instead about effort exerted and uniqueness of the space. It belongs to you, just a little bit, because you are sharing it a little less with everyone.

  If only such places weren’t just as transitory (for hours or minutes).

Being a painter visiting Doron Langberg's studio is like being a kid in a candy shop.

Doron is a recent painting grad from Yale who moved to NYC with a group of friends from school. He rents a tiny studio in Queens, but it doesn't feel tiny, because every wall is covered with giant paintings. 

If we think of a painting as a window, he has a great view.

Doron uses source material from observation, photography, and mirror. His work is figurative, but since Doron creates inverse relationships between figure and ground, the presence of the figure emerges as you experience the painting. He wants each image to read first as material, and then as the figure. They share the sensuality of Bonnard, but with a different treatment of mark. 

As we discuss his large paintings, Doron mentions that he uses small paintings to solve problems in his larger ones. He jumps to a corner of his studio and begins to unwrap five or six small paintings. They are not studies, but complete paintings in themselves. Scaling down allows for changes to be made by changing the size of the mark and canvas. 

People ask Doron why his paintings are about sex. But the whole of the painting is about sex- Doron's use of paint is sensual and seductive, and this clearly directs the content of each painting. This genuinity is crucial and very specific to his own experience. There is something beautiful to be found in things that are explicit. Nature is uncomfortable and awkward, and of course this provides some fertile ground for Doron to use to his advantage.

For more images and information, visit http://www.doronlangberg.com/portfolio/

                                                  An hour and a half train ride away from Grand Central Station, Dia:Beacon sits in a rolling landscape on the Hudson River in Beacon, NY. Rising out of a master design by artist Robert Irwin, Dia is a converted industrial designed museum dedicated to contemporary art. The group had a chance to view work composed of a permanent collection of art from the 1960s, including a year-long retrospective of Carl Andre's work,  Sculpture As Place.

                 Dia's large scale-installations have an organized expanse of space to live and breathe through a dialogue of spatial phenomena and experiential perception. Upon entry, one is first met by the delicate and methodical sculptures by Carl Andre and is immediately aware of the scale of your body. One can wander and come across the low reverberating hum of the Agnes Martin room,  Robert Ryman's static awareness,  or Sol Lewitt's site specific drawings.  Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, among others were all contributing to the viewer's perceptual conversation with the space. Through addressing the external, the artists have composed a  conversation that extends itself to each room. Although the artists displayed come from separate spheres of study, Dia's installations are not only cohesive, but conjoined.

                The pieces were contained in a space that lent itself to a heightened sensorial experience - everything from the window panes (a signature of Robert Irwin) to the cold dark basement where Bruce Naumans lurked. Dia:Beacon clears presumptions of viewing and is activated through the senses- a place where description falls short and must be experienced.   

Adventures in Chinatown.

View of Manhattan just outside MoMA. it's nice, but personally I think what's inside the museum was more interesting. Today we got to see two fantastic retrospectives of important 20th century artists: Sigmar Polke and Lygia Clark. (as well as the MoMA's world class permanent collection.)

Islands of miscellany, a dozen or a hundred lives worth - of oddities and even rarer banalities collapsed in corners and on tables and behind shelves, but parted easily so the artist could move though and study them; her notes stretching across the walls.

    I am especially amused by the chandelier sitting on a stool framed by the window on the left.  

We had the privilege of having a studio visit with Dawn Clements, and speaking with her about her practice. Dawn's work takes the form of sprawling wall sized ink drawings of elaborate domestic scenes either from her own life, or those depicted in films. She works in ball point pen, Sumi ink and sometimes water color.

Since she draws from life, and never from memory or imagination, she makes many of her drawings from home, her studio servers her as much as a place to collect store and catalogue objects employed in her drawings as a place to work.

The presence of these objects, in their number and diversity makes her studio a kind of extension of her drawing, in that it contains many of the drawings themselves, but also in that the cluttered, bubbling space they depict is very germane to the experience of seeing her studio space: there is more than you could ever hope to see, much less name, competing for your attention and so the entire space starts to coagulate into compositional swells and hushes, a rough, complexly undulating and captivating melody that seduces the eye to swim through it endlessly.

    A charming malestrom.

Her extensive drawings that ramble over and across the artifice of the modern home. She says for her drawing is a way of getting to know things, and starts drawings because of a desire to get to know specific objects. She talked much about the history of drawing and it's relationship to the art world where, until relatively recently drawings on paper were not considered finished pieces, but studies to get to know a thing before it appears in the final work. Her dedicated study of these objects means that her drawings are in large part a discipline of mapping a 3d spatial reality onto the surface of her ever expanding paper. Here the staccato way the eye darts around collecting visual information before the brain patches it together (with, of course inevitable distortion, deletion and fabrication here and there.) is mirrored in the way she takes fragmented and inconsistent spaces and, as she puts it, "attempts a seamless whole" It is then no surprise then why she in some of her drawings take scenes from films and works them together into a drawing of a continuous panorama that was never on screen.

Dawn is an overwhelmingly kind and thoughful person, who was eager to speak to us, discuss our questions and  show us some of her process. Her drawings almost always end up extending beyond the dimensions of the starting piece of paper, and so she adds additional sheets during the drawing so that the piece grows organically, often bending around corners and often at larger than life size. one of her projects consists of many, many small (for Dawn) notebook sized panels tiled forming the image depicting a tabletop with various household items and small sculptures.

  *inconsiderate student photobombs artist.

This piece, not only in it's generous detail and technical prowess, but also in the methodical process of it's construction (namely that she spends precisely one  hour on each of the over 170 panels and does no more than two per day (you do the math)) demonstrates her deep, monk like commitment to the medium, and indeed the act of observation itself.

  If you have not yet had the chance to see her drawings in person, I cannot suggest it highly enough; the scale and folded quilted paper quality make them difficult to fully appreciate from a jpeg. If you are in NYC, she has some new work showing at Honey Ramka right now.

more here