MixedMedia

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.

Last week’s New Yorker cover struck me with some mixed emotions. Great to see it take the format of Time, Life and other “people” oriented news magazines by featuring the portrait of a person of prominence (yeah, whatever). Actually, a very important figure, our new President, Barack Obama.But a couple of things seemed amiss. First, it didn’t really look like the thin and point-featured Barack Obama I’d come to be familiar with from news sources. No, this one looked more like… Denzel Washington?  Then again, what was with the Washington wig?The portrait is called, “The First.” Its clearly intended to give the subject, our 44th, some historical weight. Wait, except he doesn’t need any. His movement, his message, his election *are* the historical weight.To be fair, this cover is about race. At least that’s what the association between the portrait and the title is intended to inspire. And I don’t want to dismiss that. In fact, I think David Remnick’s piece in this week’s magazine is an eloquent, memorable testimony to this important moment in history. Putting a wig on the President and dressing him in 18th century attire and associating him with a leader who, having showed great courage in many ways, did little as president to support the cause of slavery seems awkward and confused.No doubt as President Obama builds his own legacy as the nation’s top leader, the need to project the trappings and images of history will fall away and he will emerge into popular art unadorned, unencumbered. I will look forward to the end of the backward glancing arts.

Thanks to dear friend Jon for this must see international video collaboration. I am completely taken with the idea of using the urban landscape as a canvas. And even though the subject is kind of dull and reductive, the inspiration is brilliant!

In memoriam

Perhaps more later…

While I was in Ithaca last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Victoria Romanoff, restorationist and artist. One of the pieces of ‘functional salvage art’ she introduced me to was her “washboard table.” The idea is elegantly simple: for an open-faced (front and back) table, join two antique washboards together with a top surface and an interior-mounted lower shelf. For a closed-back table, join three washboards together.

I had fun over the weekend creating some collage-texture work and joining them together as a side table. To give the top a nice clean edge, I trimmed the lip all the way around at 45 degrees. A coat of waterbased finish later, voila! A bright, colorful and very stable but lightweight table.

Next time, I’ll have to make sure I find matching washboards to match: I was so excited to get started on this effort that I’ve used a bronze, horizontally oriented board on one side, and a plated silver, vertically oriented board on the other. Both made by National Corporation of Chicago and bought locally for about $4.00.