ART ART ART

A few blog posts ago I mentioned that there was a specific painting which I would love to own, but with a price tag of $11,000 it seemed unlikely. For a few months I found myself scheming and plotting about how I could manage to scrape up that amount of money (sell motorcycles? sell my Scout? sell random stuff on eBay?) but I really couldn't fathom how to do it. The painting is a large-scale female nude, and at some point I even cleared enough wall space in my office to hang it. When I finally came to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to be spending that much on a painting, I hit upon the idea of finding an artist online whom I could commission to make a different large-scale nude for that same spot on my wall. I did in fact find a fantastically talented guy in Russia (how about that internet, huh?) and for an incredibly reasonable fee he did a full-scale nude drawing for me. In negotiating with him, I tried my best to convey exactly what I was looking for... to distill what were the elements of the original painting that I liked so much. The subject of the original painting is confrontationally looking directly at the viewer, and I felt that was important. She is standing neutrally - not trying to be sexy, not flirting with the viewer, and yet she is quite beautiful - so I conveyed that to my new online Russian friend (let's call him Igor) as well. I specified the hair color and a few other details. And yet... when the drawing arrived... it was just not right. There was something critical about the woman in the original painting that I had failed to put my finger on (and had therefor obviously failed to convey to Igor), and that is that she was confident. Igor's subject had a very slight slouch in her shoulders and an ever-so-subtle "beaten" or "weary" look in her eyes, and it just ruined it for me. Minute subtleties in posture are so very important, both in art and in life - I believe posture is one of the main parameters on which we judge other people. I don't feel that this was Igor's fault. I was looking for something too specific, and I wasn't able to communicate it to him.

I found the whole process so interesting, from a psychological point of view. There was some feeling that the original $11,000 painting gave me, and that is the value of it to me. The feeling. Even though Igor's drawing is technically wonderful, the feeling I got from the painting was really different. I guess one thing I figured out was that I find confidence quite appealing. (How's that for uncomfortable voyeurism, Joseph!) I am reminded of my previous discussions of Niccoló dell'Arca and the importance of the role of emotion in artwork, as well as of Alexander McQueen and the allure of cold confidence.

Finally I hit upon the idea to make a copy of the original painting for myself. This would save me just about $11,000 (well, let's say $10,950 because of art supplies), and would give me a reason to actually paint, for the first time in my life. Yes, I've never painted before. I painted it on plywood instead of canvas. I painted initially in water color because I was afraid to jump right in with something like gouache or oil, but then went back over the image with Caran d'Ache water-soluble colored pencils when I saw the limitations of water colors. To be honest I very much enjoyed the process and I am very happy with the result. My copy of this great painting manages to evoke much the same feeling in me as the original, and that counts as a success in my book.

Only after completing the painting did it occur to me to research the legality of what I'd done. While the overwhelming majority of the views expressed online seem to espouse the idea that copying someone else's painting is OK as long as you are honest about the fact that it's a copy and that you do not sell it, there is a minority claiming that even personal use would be illegal. So, I'm not going to post my efforts here, or name the original. (Haha, what a tease!)

But the upshot of it is that I am inspired to make more paintings, original works that aren't copies. The only thing I can imagine painting at the moment are large-scale confident female nudes, but hey.. that could change. Way back in my blog post of April 2nd of last year I mentioned that I had an idea for an image that would be well-conveyed through painting. At that time I dismissed the idea that I might paint it myself... but now I am considering it. That particular image features just such a female figure, but has a thematically significant and rather complicated background as well. So who knows, maybe I'll start painting...

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My last post, with its allusion to an existential crisis about the future of this blog, elicited a few messages of support. Thanks. One such writer was my brother, who encouraged me to write more about my thoughts behind my different sculptures. When I was in LA last month I got a similar message from my pal Jon Alloway. Cool, glad you guys like reading that sort of stuff.

I had to look back through my posts from last year to see what I'd written about my thoughts behind "With Open Arms," because I sort of thought I'd covered it already. It turns out that everything I ever wrote was presented in the post of March 3rd, in which I announced that Burning Man had decided to fund my project, and in which I also posted the application materials, which laid out the concept of the piece. 

To be fair, the content of that post covers it for the most part. But it's also true that I did flesh out the narrative of the piece a bit more, as I spent more time with the sculpture. The basic idea of the piece is that it is a monument from a possible future, a dystopian future. In this future, humans have become so thoroughly subjugated by our robot overlords that they (the robots) have decided to appoint (or build) one of their own kind to be our new god. The idea of a god is foreign to them, but they have scanned through the annals of our human history and observed that we have a tendency to invent gods which we then worship. They see the value of the presence of a god within human society as a force which they can use to organize us, control us, and keep us docile. So even though they know full well that this new god is nothing more than another robot (albeit an unusual and special one), they have convinced us impressionable humans that it is in fact our new god, which we must worship and serve, or risk death (by either punishment via one of the god's formidable human-processing end-effectors, or by starvation... because robots and AI networks now control all means of food production and distribution.)

The low-relief frieze around the piece pretty much spells out this story, and I imagine that most people who spend any time with the sculpture can pretty much put this narrative together in their own heads. 

As I wrote the above paragraph, I had a flash - a realization - that this piece would actually benefit from some light kinetic mechanization. Because the truth is that the piece is not really intended to be a monument from some dystopian future, as I wrote above, but is in fact supposed to be the actual robot, the one that was built as our god. In line with this idea, it would be fantastic if the central figure, the robot, would actually move. The issue is that some sort of simple, repetitive movement (like the claw opening and closing with a cyclical motor, for instance) would be lame. What would be not-lame would be if the character had realistic, life-like movement on many different joints, in the service of it looking genuinely lifelike. I thought about trying to achieve this prior to the sculpture's debut at Burning Man by incorporating a very subtle movement of the head... but there just wasn't time for that, much less for full-body multi-axis articulation. Burning Man timelines are really short for building this kind of thing... 4 months is tight. A friend of mine in Berlin, Frank Barnes, advised me: "When it comes to kinetic movement, go really big... or not at all." I think he is basically right, and real-world constraints forced me to go "not at all" on With Open Arms. But it's a tantalizing idea for the future to mechanize that freakish robot god.

The other thing I was hoping to achieve with the sculpture, which would be something that would work on a much more subtle and subconscious level, was to mirror on a metaphorical level our relationship with technology. What I mean to say here is that I was hoping to build something so alluringly beautiful that people would be drawn to it, wanting to spend time with it. And then, slowly, upon getting closer and taking in the details, they would realize they were in the presence of an entity that might well be malicious - that might not have their best interests at heart. In the ideal metaphorical construct, they would be so drawn to this figure that they would override their concerns for their own well-being and stick around anyway. This narrative would mimic the way we are drawn in by our little black-screened techno buddies, and can't seem to step away from them even when we begin to understand the damage they do to us. Hence the central god figure's good face and bad face and mixed bag of benevolent and menacing end effectors.

A topic which is tangentially related to the "what I actually had in mind for this particular piece" discussed above, and one which I personally find more interesting (in part because it's still largely mysterious to me) is: "how to come up with good ideas in the first place."

Well, I have no frickin idea. 

Haha, that's not absolutely correct! What I can say is that I feel there ideally should be a role for both the pre-conscious intuition (what we might call inspiration), as well as for the rigorous intellect. Ideally, the first part of the process is that an idea should come in a flash, and then secondarily that idea can be worked out, embellished, and forced into line with reality by the intellect. In many cases this secondary process can add significantly to the meaning and the richness of the work.

One thing that I've observed, and which I think is really worth pointing out, is that it is not necessary (indeed, in many cases it is not even sufficient) to just sit around and wait for the inspiration to strike. On the contrary, I think it is important to consciously and intentionally immerse oneself in a soup of ingredients as a way of encouraging the alchemic spark to suddenly unite those ingredients into an idea. 

With Open Arms presents a good example of what I am talking about. When Burning Man announced the theme of "I, Robot" last year, I did not initially have any idea what to propose. So I started reading about the current, and near-future, state of affairs in the worlds of robots and AI. Some ideas, or to be more accurate... a tone, started to gel. Then Christina and Kodiak and I visited an Indonesian Cultural Center in Berlin, and while Christina and Kodiak watched the shadow puppet theater I found the library. Glancing through a book of Hindu / Buddhist religious statuary was the last ingredient needed, and suddenly the image of a robot god formed in my head. Lots and lots of intentional, conscious modifications and refinements followed that first flash of inspiration, working out issues of construction and lighting and aesthetic refinements and dreaming up the frieze to convey the narrative, but it was all in service to that first idea.

One is not always so lucky. I have had situations in which I very much wanted to present a proposal for consideration for funding, but had no "inspirational spark." In certain of those instances I have sort of "forced" myself to consciously construct a vision. And frequently, those proposals are not quite as strong. 

Christina and I pushed the "Submit" button earlier today on our Burning Man proposals for 2019, and that is a great feeling. The proposals are quite a bit of work, and it feels good to be done with them. The idea for my proposal for this year actually came from a song, of all places. That process was a bit unique in the sense that I saw the image really clearly, and felt very strongly about the power of the image without really knowing what it meant. Only later did I try to figure out WHY it was a powerful image. Luckily, I think I did hit upon a kernel of meaning... something that feels a bit universal... if I may say so. Also, I think this piece fulfills Keith Haring's Lesson # 3 a bit better than With Open Arms did. Of course I will expand on this piece after February 21st, when we hear back from Burning Man, whether it is funded or not.

Well, in keeping with Keith Haring's Lesson # 2, I belted this blog post out in one fast sitting. 

No pictures.

Wait, is that OK? Should I add a picture?

OK, here's one...

It's been snowing a lot here lately. In this pic you can see, from left to right... The Hand of Man (disassembled on pallets in the background), Fledgling, a pre-historic heavy equipment bucket (yard art), Garraplata (the lobster), Skeletor, and the Subjugator. We should charge admission to this place.

Bye.