Before perspective

Driving a point home is, by its very nature, a fallacy. Rhetoric is very attractive and alluring. We want to chisel and crystalize and clarify and resolve. It comes from being a spermatozoon. We were spermatozoa and an oocyte. We were potential for a multitude of possibilities. As individuals we latch onto one of those ideas and we keep refining our logic in an ongoing contest. It's just a force of origin.

I read these articles about the art market as if those words are supposed to go together at all. Production - now that is another story. But art isn't a commodity. It's a process. The reason people buy objects is to symbolically select, by transaction, a facet of that process. There really are no art objects. I can see them but I can recall them with the same cognitive process. I don't need to own one to relate to it. It doesn't matter whether an object is ancient or was made recently. It doesn't matter if I am in the tail end of human story or in its ancient past.

The objects are made to show someone that we exist. Our beloved no longer believes that we exist so we have to prove it over and over again. And we do it by pretending we are participating in something we understand, as if we belong to it, as if we are in our element. But we look over our shoulder to see if we are seen. We make incomprehensible art because we want to know if someone will clarify our confounded state for us. We wonder if being confounded is more honest than being knowledgeable. Then we wonder why we should be honest. So we make art and sell it to each other. We exchange symbols, and it's all sex.

detail above


Paintings on this blog are by John Brown unless otherwise noted.
Exhibition at Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto through the month of
November, 2008
Accompanying catalogue written by John Bentley Mays.

Makeness

I have to think up a more accurate word for what is called filmmaking - because it's not film and it's not really making. It's taping and wangling. Tapewangling.

I'm not attracted to tapewangling.

But filmmaking is really more of a handicraft like sewing or knitting, more and more. As the tools of that medium become regarded for their historical, symbolic value it feels like we can choose to live in a made world or theoretical arranged world - or both.

The other day I was helping a shop owner move her inventory of stuff to a new location. She deals in objects that are valued for their historical properties but also for their de-valued properties. Labels, cigar bands, letraset, keys, test tubes, dye cut paper, foil, ink stamps, wrapping paper, parts, doodads, yarn, matchbooks - tonnes and tonnes of this stuff, up to rafters. They are all tangible: old, process printed, inked relics, disintegrating. They are the objects that pack the corners in uneasy dreams. The stuff dreams are made of I suppose. Print is disintegrating, film is decomposing, digital media is not here for the long haul. But the disintegration is still tangible as particles that have the weight of their history embedded in them.

I have an uneasy label under my name on my website. I've given myself the tag of illustrator and filmmaker because I was taking a course in self employment. Everyone in the class had to be a noun who verbs. So anyway, the site is odd. I make slippers. I sew things. I write things and look at art. I enthuse about art. I pine for the experience of making-ness. Kids live in a made world. They handle beads and wires and wool. In an hour they have produced a toy or a gift and they've made themselves a history. What about all the hours of experience of making that occurs for the event of tapewangling? Where do those memories go? I feel that they are storehoused white elephants.

Absence is its own thing

Absence is memory of a thing's presence. In John Brown's paintings over the past few years the process of scraping and systematic removal of paint is a form of making imagery.

I'm thinking about injuries and healing as a process that reveals a new form. Bones and tissues are different after an injury. Some parts are never replaced and there are physical gaps.

I was feeling accustomed to the "resultant" dis-appearance of the paintings when I noticed, by contrast, his more recent work supports a build-up of painterly forms, painterly staccatos, flat black angled forms like stealth bombers, industrial bunkers, or Ned Kelly's armor; forms conceived as invisible, as negations.

Along with the black forms are flare-red islands, some appearing consructed and some topographic, with a ferrous mineral quality. The colours and forms indicate an industrial landscape not devoid of a human presence - but an extension of human activity and physicality.

Redredblack, oil on wood, John Brown, 2008.

gnosticatacitsong

Meet the filmmakers event: Mike Hoolboom in an interview with Dana Claxton at Cineworks, October 1, 2008

I was paying attention to questions or statements from Hoolboom that would incite Dana Claxton to talk about the kind of things we don't know about. Anecdotes, stories, observances, problems, finding words.

The reason I was watching the form of the interview unfold is because I am preparing a study of some kind - maybe an interview documentary, maybe a scripted format piece about my friend Jack and his painting. He has warned me that he can be tight-lipped about a lot of his ideas about painting. I think he's reticent to disclose or package his nature in a journalistic format of any kind. So I noticed Claxton was matter of fact about the content of her films and the simple process under which many of them were made because obviously her films are her own activities. But after some time, and after a sequence of heartfelt observations by Hoolboom, the interview began to take a shape that was evocative of Claxton's personal history. And in a way it was a kind of satsang for me. Both filmmakers are at home with the sacred in art without talking directly about the sacred. It came up in this way, for example - in describing a subtle art installation he'd witnessed recently, Hoolboom said: It might as well not have been there. Absence was accounted for in the conversation. The place is packed with absences.

My own historical absence took its place beside me tonight as I reflected on the conversation. I used to make one up (a personal history) but I don't anymore. I just don't have one. The notion is foreign to me.

Art at this crossroad is a pallindrome. Gnostic, a tacit song. Forward and backward are the same direction. Anything with tangibility is now a miracle. Is it possible that we understand through art that life itself is enough?