So here's a recent piece... the first is a more recent shot of it installed, and as it's intended to be viewed. The others are here for detail purposes so you can see more of the surface. It's about 30 inches long.
also- this is a cool irish guy that was in my class.. http://www.samkeogh.net/index.php?/project/terrestris/
not as nice of a webpage but he's sharp, he was also fascinated with a scene in close encounters of a third kind where dreyfus is obsessed with subliminal, mental images of a mountain-like shape and begins to make models of it, throwing everything in the yard inside to make 'it' when he sees that he's made a model of devils tower thats on the tv...
frankly, to me, it seems that you've never put up with a pretense of constructing something or looked for an excuse to make or do. any sort of content for me rest in the fact that you went to the effort to make something like this, something seemingly so meaningless -except of course- to the weird person - ;) - that was compelled to make it at all...i can't help but project ALOT of existential..stuff..
before Nietzsche, Kierkegaard in seeing that people found meaning in actual experiences, realized that using logic in interpreting the world was insufficient as a source of meaning so he decided to make, as we know it today, a ʻleap of faithʼ in finding meaning in a meaningless world by doing more things instead. because, for him, only when knowledge was tested by experience could it be able to come alive and have meaning in him. Dr. Frankl developed what he called Logotherapy, or in greek ʻmeaning therapyʼ, as a type of psychological analysis that focuses on a will to meaning as opposed to a Nietzschean /Adlerian doctrine of "will to power" or Freud's "will to pleasure." To confront barriers for meaning in life he observed how in different people that life could have meaning under any circumstances, even the most miserable ones and that because of this people have a freedom, short of death, that canʼt be taken away. By usually creating a work or doing a deed; or experiencing something or encountering someone; and generally by the attitude we take. He described a Sunday neurosis as common condition of suicide resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness in their lives once the working week is over, which not only relates to a large portion of retired and aging people but with depression, aggression, and addiction younger generations also. He even argued like Kierkegaard for "Dereflection", and to quit endlessly reflecting on the self and instead, engage more in living because on the whole, the therapeutic response was that the question itself—what is the meaning of life?—evaporates when one is fully engaged in life. When he compared his camp experiences with his academic experiences he wrote about a neurotic fatalism, which taught that man was nothing but a product of heredity, environment, and just made one believe that they were a victim of inner and outer circumstances, which made them deny their own freedom not from conditions but in facing those conditions. A nihilistic indoctrination where he couldnʼt understand why the re-humanization of a field, that whenever meaning was brought up in a positive context, that it became dogmatic or ʻguruʼ territory even though the making of meaning itself wasnʼt dogmatic...
it goes on but this might be the most relevant part for you of a presentation i did at goldsmiths a couple months ago. hope you like-
Interesting, Tommy. I liked the Sam Keogh link, and I think that can add to the conversation. Unfortunately, I got lost at " a Nietzschean /Adlerian doctrine of "will to power," so I may not be able to adequately respond to your post. Andy, my first question is, how do you see the pedestal? When I'm looking at things people make, I enjoy looking for logic, and it often sustains me through more difficult passages to get me to new thoughts and interpretations. It may be that you are trying to juxtapose three different logic systems here, but I'm trying to pull them together to get a summation of the whole. So I wonder about cohesion. I like that there are some formal similarities between the top two objects (pink I readily identify), but I get a little lost on the wafer board portion. So, I'm hoping to here your thoughts on the relationship between these things.
From the photos I see here, I think I like the ceramic piece best when it's on its own. I particularly like the meandering gold lines. They have a elegance and refinery as they move over a rather crude surface. Great to see new work!
Sorry it took me so long to respond. My kids had separate spring breaks back to back so I have been with the kids 24/7 for the last two weeks. I want to respond first without reading what Tommy and Micah wrote, so pardon the disjointed conversation. Then I will go back and read what they said and add anything that comes up.
My first instinct about the photos as a group is that I am much more drawn to the last three photos and completely turned off by the first. Frankly, I have never been one that enjoyed (but do completely understand) the movement of 'denying art a little revelry' such as demoting its pedestal. Does it make the experience feel more of late, yes. But you see that kind of thing too much these days and I am starting to write those kind of moves off as too weak. As if the artist is saying, "There was something inside me that needed to make this thing, but I don't want anyone to know that I have these kind of needs or that I care about them." Like the part in the movies where the guy says, "I love you....r sweater. Your sweater looks nice today." I don't know. I always felt like the classical one in grad school, which I would never have thought about myself. I mean, I understand juxtaposition, but I think that it only works when the touch of something is not so loving. Which, let's face it Andy, your work has all over it. To me the object seems like you just scoped out all of your insides, including those elements of the subconscience, and laid it out for all to see. But first, you adorned it with the belief of its worth, which is what makes it so fragile and lovely, yet still a pile of your inner secretions.
With the simplified object, I keep thinking of the oyster and the pearl. The actual definition of a pearl is "a hard object produced within the soft tissue of a living shell mollusk. Pearls are formed inside the shell of certain mollusks as a defense mechanism against a potentially threatening irritant such as a parasite inside its shell, or an attack from outside, injuring the mantle tissue. The mollusk creates a pearl sac to seal off the irritation." The theory that a pearl forms from a single grain of sand is actually rarely the case. To be more clear, I guess why I think of this metaphor is that I do not need to see the mire in which this beauty emerged to understand that it had to have come from a place of juices and earthly slime. I feel the same way about your object. It already denies classical beauty. The pedestal just reiterates it for me.
I know everyone has a different way of looking at art. For me, I always imagine what I would do with it if I could walk away with it, whether it is an actual form or just a concept. This one would feel like a house guest, not a piece of art. And well, I think that means you nailed it (except for the crummy pedestal, a nightstand will suffice).
Well Well Well, first an apology for failing to realize that people were commenting on this. So much is going on these days for me that I'd mostly forgot this was up here. I really appreciate the time and thought from all of you.
Funny that everyone seems to point out the "pedestal" as the most offending culprit. It's helpful for me to have that perspective, as I'm assuming most of you haven't seen my work for a while and have fresher eyes than I do when coming to it.
I'll say a few things about it. Most of my work in the past couple of years has been within the context of installations, which for a lot of reasons, have included more banal, home improvement type materials (hence the OSB/wafer board here). Within the ceramic portions of these installations, I'm particularly focused on reusing parts of previous pieces, from my own work, and others around me as a way of sampling the studio environment, recontextualizing tangible links to experience, directly in the assemblage. In the second to last photo above, there is a visible wheel within the piece, which was a discarded casting of a studio mate's in Montana last year, having been cast from an piece of machinery on the brickyard grounds we were working in. I salvaged this from his reclaim pile, and then coated it in my own surfaces, enjoying not only the finished layers of surfaces, but also the various layers of use for this particular object.
I'm interested in the OSB as a material along the same line of logic... recycled or repurposed wood shavings industrially sourced, compressed to create a usable product. I don't desire to enter into a debate about the worthiness of such endeavors (sure chemicals, carcinogens, etc.), but I do find the act worth reflecting on in a sort of utopian/dystopian dialog.
As a result, I've often created spaces where the clay work rests in, around, or on unfinished structures from recycled wood products. Rarely actually, have the wood structures been as formally minimal, or rectalinear as in this case. Yes it functions here as a pedestal, and yes, that language is one that is rampant in 3d presentation, and is one I try to engage always... in my mind this piece was more of a conscious return to the gallery format of mid-height plinths, but interrupted here with the rawness of the bare wood, and brought into a realm of irony with a painted pink tree stump.
There's a further nod to 3d, and specifically ceramic presentation here that may not be evident. In recent years pink insulation foam has been a fixture, ad nauseam, in ceramic sculpture. I recently showed a piece like this at a ceramics conference, and everyone I talked to wanted to know how I made the foam look so much like an actual tree stump. I don't think anyone even considered I might just cut a piece of a tree stump off and paint it pink, which is of course what had actually been done.
In any case, all of this work seeks to either find less tired means of fabrication, construction, presentation, visual language, etc., and perhaps poke a little fun at the MORE tired versions of these I see around. I recognize this is sort of an esoteric dialogue only intelligible to ceramics folks... and this conversation has made that more apparent. Perhaps it's time to reconsider this line of inquiry though, because limiting my audience feels kind of, well, lame, the more I think about it.
And I love the pearl discussion G, and perhaps all the more reason to enjoy the object alone, without the surrounding mire. Thanks for that.
Micah - I think of you often up there in Minot. Maybe some of the logic you're asking about makes more sense now?
And Tommy - I was an undergrad religious studies major before I made art, and spent a good deal of time with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and even Viktor Frenkl's Logotherapy... Those texts are often foundations for me of looking, relating to others, and specifically others' work. It's nice to have you bring them up.
Thanks for all of your time and energy - this has been great fun. I miss seeing all of you, and hope this forum can continue.
Andy, I love this little anecdote about everyone at the ceramics conference wanting to know how you made the pink foam look like a tree stump--so very clever! Knowing the context really gives it a boost. In addition, I imagine that up close the pink of the stump would reflect light onto the bottom of the ceramic piece, creating a vulnerable soft underbelly to an otherwise hard object (which could be interesting).
I also like hearing about that little wheel imbedded in the work; I definitely noticed it right away, and now that it is confirmed as an otherwise functional found object, it reinforces my initial impression of a gradual layering of residue over time--as objects in a shipwreck calcify underwater and become these bizarre ghosts of their original selves. But then when you see the detail of the piece up close--those delicate gold veins and splashes of pink, and these shiny cake frosting layers-- it sort of contradicts that original impression and becomes something a bit more sugary and glamorous. Gosh, I hope that makes sense! Really enjoyed seeing this :)
Nice webpage!
ReplyDeletealso- this is a cool irish guy that was in my class..
http://www.samkeogh.net/index.php?/project/terrestris/
not as nice of a webpage but he's sharp, he was also fascinated with a scene in close encounters of a third kind where dreyfus is obsessed with subliminal, mental images of a mountain-like shape and begins to make models of it, throwing everything in the yard inside to make 'it' when he sees that he's made a model of devils tower thats on the tv...
frankly, to me, it seems that you've never put up with a pretense of constructing something or looked for an excuse to make or do. any sort of content for me rest in the fact that you went to the effort to make something like this, something seemingly so meaningless -except of course- to the weird person - ;) - that was compelled to make it at all...i can't help but project ALOT of existential..stuff..
before Nietzsche, Kierkegaard in seeing that people found meaning in actual experiences, realized that using logic in interpreting the world was insufficient as a source of meaning so he decided to make, as we know it today, a ʻleap of faithʼ in finding meaning in a meaningless world by doing more things instead. because, for him, only when knowledge was tested by experience could it be able to come alive and have meaning in him. Dr. Frankl developed what he called Logotherapy, or in greek ʻmeaning therapyʼ, as a type of psychological analysis that
focuses on a will to meaning as opposed to a Nietzschean /Adlerian doctrine of "will to power" or Freud's "will to pleasure." To confront barriers for meaning in life he observed how in different people that life could have meaning under any circumstances, even the most miserable ones and that because of this people have a freedom, short of death, that canʼt be taken away. By usually creating a work or doing a deed; or experiencing something or encountering someone; and generally
by the attitude we take. He described a Sunday neurosis as common condition of suicide resulting from an awareness in
some people of the emptiness in their lives once the working week is over, which not only relates to a large portion of retired
and aging people but with depression, aggression, and addiction younger generations also. He even argued like Kierkegaard
for "Dereflection", and to quit endlessly reflecting on the self and instead, engage more in living because on the whole, the
therapeutic response was that the question itself—what is the meaning of life?—evaporates when one is fully engaged in life. When he compared his camp experiences with his academic experiences he wrote about a neurotic fatalism, which taught that man was nothing but a product of heredity, environment, and just made one believe that they were a victim of inner and outer circumstances, which made them deny their own freedom not from conditions but in facing those conditions. A nihilistic
indoctrination where he couldnʼt understand why the re-humanization of a field, that whenever meaning was brought up in a positive context, that it became dogmatic or ʻguruʼ territory even though the making of meaning itself wasnʼt dogmatic...
it goes on but this might be the most relevant part for you of a presentation i did at goldsmiths a couple months ago. hope you like-
Interesting, Tommy. I liked the Sam Keogh link, and I think that can add to the conversation. Unfortunately, I got lost at " a Nietzschean /Adlerian doctrine of "will to power," so I may not be able to adequately respond to your post.
ReplyDeleteAndy, my first question is, how do you see the pedestal? When I'm looking at things people make, I enjoy looking for logic, and it often sustains me through more difficult passages to get me to new thoughts and interpretations.
It may be that you are trying to juxtapose three different logic systems here, but I'm trying to pull them together to get a summation of the whole. So I wonder about cohesion. I like that there are some formal similarities between the top two objects (pink I readily identify), but I get a little lost on the wafer board portion. So, I'm hoping to here your thoughts on the relationship between these things.
From the photos I see here, I think I like the ceramic piece best when it's on its own. I particularly like the meandering gold lines. They have a elegance and refinery as they move over a rather crude surface.
Great to see new work!
Sorry it took me so long to respond. My kids had separate spring breaks back to back so I have been with the kids 24/7 for the last two weeks. I want to respond first without reading what Tommy and Micah wrote, so pardon the disjointed conversation. Then I will go back and read what they said and add anything that comes up.
ReplyDeleteMy first instinct about the photos as a group is that I am much more drawn to the last three photos and completely turned off by the first. Frankly, I have never been one that enjoyed (but do completely understand) the movement of 'denying art a little revelry' such as demoting its pedestal. Does it make the experience feel more of late, yes. But you see that kind of thing too much these days and I am starting to write those kind of moves off as too weak. As if the artist is saying, "There was something inside me that needed to make this thing, but I don't want anyone to know that I have these kind of needs or that I care about them." Like the part in the movies where the guy says, "I love you....r sweater. Your sweater looks nice today." I don't know. I always felt like the classical one in grad school, which I would never have thought about myself. I mean, I understand juxtaposition, but I think that it only works when the touch of something is not so loving. Which, let's face it Andy, your work has all over it. To me the object seems like you just scoped out all of your insides, including those elements of the subconscience, and laid it out for all to see. But first, you adorned it with the belief of its worth, which is what makes it so fragile and lovely, yet still a pile of your inner secretions.
With the simplified object, I keep thinking of the oyster and the pearl. The actual definition of a pearl is "a hard object produced within the soft tissue of a living shell mollusk. Pearls are formed inside the shell of certain mollusks as a defense mechanism against a potentially threatening irritant such as a parasite inside its shell, or an attack from outside, injuring the mantle tissue. The mollusk creates a pearl sac to seal off the irritation." The theory that a pearl forms from a single grain of sand is actually rarely the case. To be more clear, I guess why I think of this metaphor is that I do not need to see the mire in which this beauty emerged to understand that it had to have come from a place of juices and earthly slime. I feel the same way about your object. It already denies classical beauty. The pedestal just reiterates it for me.
I know everyone has a different way of looking at art. For me, I always imagine what I would do with it if I could walk away with it, whether it is an actual form or just a concept. This one would feel like a house guest, not a piece of art. And well, I think that means you nailed it (except for the crummy pedestal, a nightstand will suffice).
Great work.
Love,
G
Well Well Well, first an apology for failing to realize that people were commenting on this. So much is going on these days for me that I'd mostly forgot this was up here. I really appreciate the time and thought from all of you.
ReplyDeleteFunny that everyone seems to point out the "pedestal" as the most offending culprit. It's helpful for me to have that perspective, as I'm assuming most of you haven't seen my work for a while and have fresher eyes than I do when coming to it.
I'll say a few things about it. Most of my work in the past couple of years has been within the context of installations, which for a lot of reasons, have included more banal, home improvement type materials (hence the OSB/wafer board here). Within the ceramic portions of these installations, I'm particularly focused on reusing parts of previous pieces, from my own work, and others around me as a way of sampling the studio environment, recontextualizing tangible links to experience, directly in the assemblage. In the second to last photo above, there is a visible wheel within the piece, which was a discarded casting of a studio mate's in Montana last year, having been cast from an piece of machinery on the brickyard grounds we were working in. I salvaged this from his reclaim pile, and then coated it in my own surfaces, enjoying not only the finished layers of surfaces, but also the various layers of use for this particular object.
I'm interested in the OSB as a material along the same line of logic... recycled or repurposed wood shavings industrially sourced, compressed to create a usable product. I don't desire to enter into a debate about the worthiness of such endeavors (sure chemicals, carcinogens, etc.), but I do find the act worth reflecting on in a sort of utopian/dystopian dialog.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, I've often created spaces where the clay work rests in, around, or on unfinished structures from recycled wood products. Rarely actually, have the wood structures been as formally minimal, or rectalinear as in this case. Yes it functions here as a pedestal, and yes, that language is one that is rampant in 3d presentation, and is one I try to engage always... in my mind this piece was more of a conscious return to the gallery format of mid-height plinths, but interrupted here with the rawness of the bare wood, and brought into a realm of irony with a painted pink tree stump.
There's a further nod to 3d, and specifically ceramic presentation here that may not be evident. In recent years pink insulation foam has been a fixture, ad nauseam, in ceramic sculpture. I recently showed a piece like this at a ceramics conference, and everyone I talked to wanted to know how I made the foam look so much like an actual tree stump. I don't think anyone even considered I might just cut a piece of a tree stump off and paint it pink, which is of course what had actually been done.
In any case, all of this work seeks to either find less tired means of fabrication, construction, presentation, visual language, etc., and perhaps poke a little fun at the MORE tired versions of these I see around. I recognize this is sort of an esoteric dialogue only intelligible to ceramics folks... and this conversation has made that more apparent. Perhaps it's time to reconsider this line of inquiry though, because limiting my audience feels kind of, well, lame, the more I think about it.
And I love the pearl discussion G, and perhaps all the more reason to enjoy the object alone, without the surrounding mire. Thanks for that.
Micah - I think of you often up there in Minot. Maybe some of the logic you're asking about makes more sense now?
And Tommy - I was an undergrad religious studies major before I made art, and spent a good deal of time with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and even Viktor Frenkl's Logotherapy... Those texts are often foundations for me of looking, relating to others, and specifically others' work. It's nice to have you bring them up.
Thanks for all of your time and energy - this has been great fun. I miss seeing all of you, and hope this forum can continue.
Andy, I love this little anecdote about everyone at the ceramics conference wanting to know how you made the pink foam look like a tree stump--so very clever! Knowing the context really gives it a boost. In addition, I imagine that up close the pink of the stump would reflect light onto the bottom of the ceramic piece, creating a vulnerable soft underbelly to an otherwise hard object (which could be interesting).
ReplyDeleteI also like hearing about that little wheel imbedded in the work; I definitely noticed it right away, and now that it is confirmed as an otherwise functional found object, it reinforces my initial impression of a gradual layering of residue over time--as objects in a shipwreck calcify underwater and become these bizarre ghosts of their original selves. But then when you see the detail of the piece up close--those delicate gold veins and splashes of pink, and these shiny cake frosting layers-- it sort of contradicts that original impression and becomes something a bit more sugary and glamorous. Gosh, I hope that makes sense! Really enjoyed seeing this :)