A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy” from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. So plenty of fodder. I took up the task and wanted to document the process and result to share.

Step One
Create the form. Since the sarcophagus was going to be used to store candy, I knew it needed two halves. I drew and cut one out of a large cardboard box, and essentially copied it for the second half. In the center, cut out a square somewhat larger than a shoebox size, leaving enough room on the edges to retain structural integrity.

(more…)

Around the holidays last year I’d made a promise to knock out a washboard table with a collage top for a family member. I’d gotten the basic idea from the remarkable Victoria Romanoff in Ithaca, New York at a meet up we’d had years ago.This go around, I’d found a couple of pricier washboards with glass rubbing plates. Cleaning them was quick enough, and the greatest challenge was compensating for their irregular sizes, which was accomplished by simply adding a 1-inch riser to the top of the right board, allowing equal heights and the lining up of the joist piece.The collage top itself was a lot of fun to create. Given that the intended recipient is a family member, I had lots of raw materials to cull from: maps from trips we’d taken together, cutouts from visits we’d made to Nova Scotia and elsewhere, scraps of my daughter’s artwork, etc. The piece came together well - unexpectedly “white” but to good effect.For the joist piece I simply cleaned up a piece of antique board found in the barn, painted it white, and sanded it down to enhance the texture and integrate it with the top piece.The most pleasant discovery in this piece of work is that one can place a light within the recess of the table between to the two legs and achieve a very nice glow to the piece. Something to think about for future, more sculptural works might be having the table closed on all four sides and illuminated. 

Paris Review 188 has a lovely collection of eleven collages by the American poet John Ashbery, 81. He’s a very interesting fellow, and if I’d ever been at Bard would have enjoyed learning from him. Academically credentialed, literarily plugged in, culturally invested - at least through the ’70s. Its not clear to me what has roused him since.But what I like to see in these collages, some of which are recent, is a bit of the hiking up of the cultural skirts and having a good romp through the puddles of whimsy.Curiously, the New York Times published 11 of Mr. Ashbery’s collages in 2008, when he had his first solo New York Gallery show.

The German artist Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997 has a large installation of his work that sprawls among the white galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m not terribly familiar with this artist, but impressed that he’d turn a Gerhard Richter painting into a table - he’s as playful and anti-establishment as the range of media and styles suggests. The artist as subject, director  and actor in the social struggle to communicate. While the rest of us bicker about what’s a more relevant, authentic, salient, expedient or efficient mode of expression he tested them all, not binding expression to a fetish or a movement of the day. Perhaps that’s why “peter” - Martin’s term for all unnamed forms - is such an endearing and appropriate expression: compact, unadorned, slightly naughty (in the American context?) and affectionable. Holland Carter put it nicely in the New York Times: “If messy and raucous aren’t your thing, and tidy objects are, Kippenberger is not for you. Sometimes when I come up against his drunk-and-disorderly divahood I think he’s not for me. But he is, absolutely, or the idea of him is, meaning the model he sets for what an artist can be and do. His multitudinous recyclings, insubordinate temperament and generosity seem unexpectedly right for a non-party-time time. With the MoMA respective a new generation of artists will get to know him. I can imagine more than a few hitching themselves to his manic star.”

Scrappy notes from a break-neck talk.Dealing with some concepts, linear time of Carnot (1846) forward - which intersects with music, eg harmonics and the end of time. Movement toward entropy. Question emerged, is it possible to move beyond the ruin of it all? NO! Let’s destroy it. So, with art and history, source of these ideas - middle Europe - disappears, along with it the old notions/nations. For the first time, time in art emerges - Dali, Picasso to Pollack. Destruction of the future.So, “Is there such a thing as ‘neutral’ time?”Getting quantum, where I fall apart, and things start to begin to behave strangely. No predictable rest state. Quantum underlays the universe, which turns out is chance. And the spiral, “if you look at it the other way, is a dead end.” Which brings us back to the end.Back to the ruin of the future (part 4?)…So, um, what we need is a better brain that stops repeating itself… Enter the light cone, how information crosses the universe, spin networks, and the idea that the universe is a hologram, an image… An image being information.Enter our information collectors and processors, our ever more powerful computers. These become rudimentary extensions of our, uh, inferior brains. So, here we are at the “new” 21st century, where content and moment rule. Information is everything - it is not a way of describing things, not knowledge, not simply a way of describing anything. Doesn’t want to be free, etc. It simply is. Hullo Kurzweil. So, enter the morning line project - take everything and fold it into a tetrahedron. combine them, wrap them up, turn them into a building. which isn’t a drawing but a drawing in space… add some music, and here we are.