*NOTE: TRANSITIONS is a section of the [YROMEM] collection of artifacts from the laptop computer I have used from 2005-22. I intend to post a version of the online presentation, which in its original form will appear simultaneously in the AFH Facebook and Instagram feeds. What follows is a text composed for publication with the selected images, in conjunction with the total program. It is being posted here first so links can be posted at AFH FB/I-G, IRT, a test of the program sequencing and format.
TRANSITIONS: So Cal > NYC + [Switzerland]
AFH Studio BK production documentation 2010-11
Laptop Artifacts Project 2022 [YROMEM]
ARTIST & CURATOR STATEMENT
1
A transitional phase in an artist’s evolution signifies an interstices occurring between well-defined creative periods, as when an artist exhausts one subject or technical approach and decides to embark on something new. The common understanding of such transitions is that the critic or collector should step back, with the expectation that for some length of time, over the course of an un-predetermined number of works, the artist will produce pieces that may not meet previously assured levels of finish, may struggle with confidence, may even produce things that shock and dismay, before settling on a new, fruitful direction. Allowing the artist space to experiment with ideas and materials might strain professional relationships. Transitional works ultimately are a sign of necessary artistic growth, especially when situated incrementally over the course of the long arc of the artist life. In the post-contemporary reality, this model has mostly been thrown overboard.
2
Which does not diminish the elements of truth in the parable — which is rooted in both art and craft, as well as the mesh of ideas that productively fuel and sustain artistry, especially the excellent kind. Practices have evolved over centuries to help artists successfully shift from one cycle to the next. A change in scenery can provide inspiration. Likewise a new relationship or other set of circumstances. The exploring of untested mediums can spark a surge of creativity. Immersion in politics, philosophy, religion, sports, food and drink, whatever. Long walks in nature. Practically anything, depending on the artist, can and has led to the unexpected in the studio. Today, most “artists” don’t maintain studios or consistent studio work schedules or programs. The transitional has become widely accepted as an adequate displacement for art, particularly the sort of transitional lifestyle that reinforces an aspirational vision of material freedom and excess. The image machine serves as its own mythology, supplanting history itself, seemingly, with a virtual version of liberation, detachment from causation, a wild and perfectly fun dream that you can follow on social media, day or night.
3
What happened in 2010-11, for context:
- I finished the second of two Masters programs at CGU
- Applied to and was accepted at EGS, completing the two summer intensives in Saas-Fee.
- Married Lauren, and we conceived a child.
- We moved from Southern California to NYC; rented a loft in Bushwick.
- Hired a studio (Bushwick/East Williamsburg) at Grand and Morgan.
- Shipped three or four pallets loaded with art, supplies and other material (from CA), with which I began to work immediately (in NYC); the rest of our stuff was put in storage (in CA).
- Participated in Reading Group Number One, BOS 2011.
- Exhibited work in LA and NYC and elsewhere.
- Attended many exhibits, lectures, performances, etc.
- Attempted unsuccessfully to start several hybrid (virtual/IRL) programs
> A political party (US Commonwealth Party)
> An artist portrait project (AFH APP)
> An artist union (AFH AU)
> A Ning-based (CMS) artist community nexus with commercial features.
- Pursued a variety of research projects.
- Maintained an extensive AFH online platform.
- Documented everything, as much and often as possible.
- In late 2011, joined OWS.
- More.
4
Reviewing the prodigious documentation of AFH Studio BK, in conjunction with [YROMEM], has proved a productive, if challenging, exercise. The first impression: the DIM TIM (Dimensional Time) series, eventually exhibited at SLAG Contemporary in 2013, makes sense more for 2022 than 2010-11. The technical features of the painting were a continuation from the mostly inconclusive, experimental work made during the MFA course, and in its aftermath. This assessment extends to digital media, including printmaking, videography, animation and photography. In many instances, the layers of paintings, in their progression, could be migrated to moving or still image creation, for applications online, for projections or monitor-based display, and so on. The themes included the Matterhorn Project’s, which focused on the Thing-as-Mountain, a multivalent object, with multiple existences. The figurative works addressed digital-native theory, such as sampling. The juxtaposition of symmetry and “perfect patterns” and non-reproducible systems plays out across platforms. “Harvesting” from archives and previous series, from art history, from contemporary culture. Much of the work references the deeply personal, even secret. It is coded. Using the cyclops was a decision stemming from a desire to revisit my artistic origin story, and update it, as I commenced on a second 25-years of art making. Everything from the first quarter century was “up for debate” or “on the table” as it were.
5
There is an all-at-once-ness quality to the content of the composition. Many threads are represented. Most significantly:
- The passing of my parents; the continuing estrangement from my first son, Will.
- Ongoing conflicts in the Middle East (and elsewhere).
- The Great Recession.
- Percolating historical rifts and disparities.
- Social upheaval rooted in the acceleration of inequality and upward redistribution of wealth.
- Cultural transformation centered on technological change.
- Escalating surveillance, imprisonment.
- Consolidation of media.
- Management and its effects.
- De-democratization and militarization or militancy at all levels of society.
- Numerical orders, pervading modes of exchange.
- Radical empowerment of the financial sector of the economy.
- Co-optation or reduction of public space and power.
- Rising centralization of messaging systems and communications networks.
- Reduced value of free speech, and diminishment of its necessary infrastructures.
- Reformation of the academy and other basics institutions.
- Environmental threats and malaise.
- Tides of negativity (despair, anger, envy, etc.)
- Displacement.
6
At the time there existed still a general resistance to integrated or hybrid arts practice, which had many designations (convergent media, multimedia, transmedia, multidisciplinary, et al.). Most dealers did not know how to sell such things. Most collectors couldn’t be bothered to “turn on” or plug in their art collection. In practice the installation of painting and sculpture next to a screen or projection with recorded audio was no longer a revolutionary proposition, and had not been in quite a while. The art world reticence had more to do with the market models of scarcity, provenance - in short, property and valuation. The latent models for extraction and exploitation, the controls for markets, the risk reduction and the critical foundations had yet to be consolidated by the established concerns and institutions. The new solutions for the problems of expression were mostly old ones. Except at the pinnacles, and arguably even there, practitioners and presenters of traditional arts were as precarious as those consigned to ever-more temporary venues. The administrators struggled to satisfy the desires of both young and old generations of viewers or audiences, simultaneously. Spectacles and blockbusters soaked up the preponderance of resources, leaving little room for innovation, outside the margins. Migration from actual to virtual modalities began as a trickle but in a few short years would become a flood. The overall impression one derives in retrospect is the wholesale re-establishment of the establishment, with broad areas of creative destruction. Potentially significant change for the improvement of the many was squashed to the benefit of the few. Cataclysm, however, looms large over Business-As-Usual, and its derivatives.
7
Re-considering the title of my SLAG exhibit: “Fallacies of Hope”; from a decade on. One finds it helpful to recall many of the bubbles within which magical scenarios unfolded, personally and collectively. This recollection does not require one to ignore the bursting of malignancies, like boils, that afflict us through the present day. Angels and monsters coincide in our world, currently, and maybe always. The lovelier bubbles are populated with the special folk who have touched us, whom we have loved and moved, reciprocally. I thought then that art and artist belonged in the fight to form more perfect unions. I believe now something very different. Post-Occupy, after Obama and Bloomberg, the Clintons, Trump. After Bernie. After the Pandemic, and the hashtag movements. The paintings I was working on in Brooklyn in 2010 and -11 were in conversation with everyone, from those closest relations, to those furthest removed, those dead, alive and unborn. If some of those visualized discussions come across as nonsense to one viewer, maybe it is because those discussions were not meant for every viewer’s sense of sensibilities. The objective in all cases was (and is) to reveal, or un-conceal, that which was hidden or secret, to get at what was, and is, true. Alternately, the falsehood in its nakedness remains as an unfortunate artifact, ugly in its luminous portrayal. But still within the bounds or borders of art, which we call its framing.
8
In the early 2010s my artistic orientation overall had transited through Pollock to Judd. Philosophically I had embraced Baudrillard, but also Badiou, Kittler, Agamben, Nancy, Lotringer, Lovink and Zizek, and others I discovered in the Alps. Others in NYC and elsewhere, like Galloway, Nechvatal, even Laruelle occupied my thinking at different points. Now, thanks to Wolfgang Schirmacher, I am embedded with Heidegger by way of Hegel and Schopenhauer. Not disclosing other sources who inform the spiritual side of things is perfunctory. I do not feel like a somebody, am comfortable being nobody, but am more comfortable being and becoming the who that I am, for one more day. Not that any of it appears in the art. Not that it does not, either. It is my understanding that thinking and art are not necessarily existing for or against each other, anymore, for which I am truly grateful. Both are spokes on the wheel whose hub is truth. I feel lamentably unqualified to hold forth on, much less defend, truth, as much as I am unqualified to conduct self-analysis. Art, however, is something else, thankfully, a thing which requires no words or narrative at all to be itself for us. The best philosophy, to my mind, accepts it as such, at minimum, and celebrates it as such, on the subjects of greatness, and what makes us, after all, human.
