nathaniel used to live up the street when we were four, now he lives a few blocks away
steph i see all the time, christine i used to live upstairs from - i like it, a photographer and a glass sculptor painting on a chess board, for a video camera, using a timeclock
camcorder view
lucy (neighbor, first time meeting) with-and/or-versus ron
ron makes a move
brush and edge of board
training for kisokaido, speed is not up, endurance not there, so have been taking the subway less. well, you see a lot, when you walk, things you wouldn't notice otherwise. but there have been several encounters over the past few days which - it's tough almost to say how bizarre (in a good way) it feels - ok no point in going on, just what happened - so, wednesday, 2.4 mile stroll:
meet les for coffee (intentional) and it turns out this is another person who lived in tokyo in the late nineties, who lives here now, not so strange, but get this, is really into traffic cones. has exhibited traffic cone art before.
do you know how many times i have asked another person "do you consider yourself to be one of the foremost experts in the world on traffic cone aesthetics?" not once, i don't think. to have the answer be "yes" and illustrate an obvioius appreciation a few minutes later as we happen across a particularly special cone and utter the words "sublime" - ok that was quite unexpected.
next evening finally heading up to meet ira for coffee on way home from location one (8.6 miles walking for the day):
and hear "erik" and there, in a large vehicle, are aaron and satoko - so the thing is, i don't see ira often. and i pretty much never see aaron and satoko. but i met them all at pretty much the same time, back in the day, and they belong in that temporal clump in my mind, those people i knew at that time, like susan and kanji and matthew and keiko - really, to see them a block away from meeting ira, after all this time, was a big connection-hammer.
that's a lot - finding out you share something in common which is exceedingly rare (traffic cone appreciation), running into old friends after ages - ok so the next day walked over 6 miles, here's some of it:
and along the way start calling people, because yeah i'm in training, physically, but have put the taking tons of photos for the collages trying to match things i see up with elements of hiroshige's prints on hold for a little while, as think harder about video etc., and want to do chess, in the park, this weekend (tomorrow actually) because all of a sudden the weather is warm and beautiful.
so i call rob. and he doesn't answer. which happens, right? and i keep walking. and twenty minutes later, there's rob. on a bench. by the river. in intense conversation with whatsername. (of course he didn't answer his phone). after the other stuff this felt distinctly weirder than maybe it merits. on the other hand, he works about three blocks from my apartment and we never run into each other in midtown. now i'm down in tribeca and call him and he's not there and i keep walking and hey, there's rob, down here in tribeca, while i want to talk to him.
oh and whatsername, by the way, our first conversation ever, here's how it goes, pretty much:
me: do you paint?
her: yeah, i do.
me: do you like chess?
her: it's my favorite game.
ok so how many girls have you ever asked "do you play chess," first meeting ever, friend-of-friend, and they say "it's my favorite game?" frankly this has never happened to me before. i hope she will participate in the chess project. really.
so this would be plenty of synchronicity. plenty.
so i'm standing there trying to recover from the "favorite game" she paints and plays chess and i was trying to see if rob wanted to paint on chess boards together, and i hear "erik?" and there's allison. the deal with allison is, i really never have contact with her, and surely part of the reason for that is she has lived in austin for the past year, but i did actually email her a few days ago because i couldn't find owen's email address. she emails back she's in a uhaul returning. but this is by the river, days later, unplanned, me having stumbled across rob, and met the chess-loving girl who paints, and here's allison with her dog -
so this blog really my purpose is to keep track of art projects, if anyone wants to know how i think or what i do, it's not all instinct but a lot of it is - anyway not about personal blah blah blah necessarily right? not "you'll never guess who i ran into at the grocery store today." but so much of this, these people, i want or wanted to involve them in these projects - i mean, the reason i was meeting less was because he had written that using black and white paint (chess project) sounded interesting - yet he's into traffic cones. and traffic cone observation is definitely going to continue to appear, in various forms, in my art, as it has for about a decade. nothing to do with chess, very relevant (especially with the lmcc open call mentioned a few posts ago).
one last map, today (6.8 miles):
nothing too weird happened, i mean alisa who lives in georgia called and we want to collaborate so maybe chess is a first step for us, she's in town, but maybe the holy-moley this feels a bit surreal this particular coincidence, maybe that's over for the moment.
excited, though. i mean, what more do you want? i figure i know maybe 500 people in the world - ok maybe it's a lot more than that - still - in just a few days - to see these particular people, at these goofy times... just awesome.
looking forward to chess tomorrow.
wouldn't that be cool? want to make it and want to do it. in the meantime can imagine.
http://www.eriksanner.com/es_blog_2007/art_mini_proposal_070418.pdf
the chess project, that's the one i got a grant for. which involved applying for a grant. so the foundation of this project is split. there were the years of vaguely wanting to do a chess project, involving other people, and painting on chess boards. then there was the descent into bureaucracy and paperwork. well, thank you lower manhattan cultural council for helping me buy the paint and the chessboards, and presumably that endorsement of this project by an institution will make it easy to get permission to do the things in the park i want to do -
ok long story short started the contracts urged in last year's volunteer lawyers for the arts bootcamp, i mean, i want to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding or displeasure right? so vla recommends contracts if you're collaborating, so today i started writing a bit about what some of the issues are (i want to be able to use this footage, basically, and i want the work to stay together as a body of work, i think, although that's something which will likely change as the project evolves)
anyway here's the beginning of what i'm going to ask participants to look at and hopefully agree to, hope you enjoy
http://www.eriksanner.com/es_blog_2007/chess_legal_stuff_beginning_070417.pdf
funny how our memories work and we can argue about what happened or what someone said or meant or didn't say... we can share this discontinuity of experience real-time, because it's not just when you look back that things are perceived and understood differently by different people, it's as it's happening, whatever it is, we might inhabit the same external universe but no way do we share our life-living sensations, do we?
the point of this is, matthew has started a blog, which is great, because if you really care about kisokaido things you can ask him, or read him, and furthermore, with two of us going at it, it'll be like stereo, you'll read things coming from two sources which should provide a more lifelike or comprehensible understanding of whatever it is we're trying to do.
http://thewalkingfool.blogspot
basically i think everyone has the potential to feel like they're on a mission. not everyone wants to be on a mission, or chooses to accept it. i think when matthew decided he wanted to walk from kyoto to tokyo, he was saying - something. and for me, i want to explore. for example, the paradox that imagination is bigger than universe yet universe must contain imagination (thank you soseki natsume), and keep travelling (which equals learning in my consciousness), and explore the nature of things, the qualities of aesthetics... anyway it was an obvious tie-in with yamanote, shikoku, what i'm doing now - a way to really face up to great work of a hero-ancestor of ours and say "what could i possibly add?"
wasn't really sure, when thinking about chess, if people would want to participate, if there would be interest. something have wanted to do for many years.
anyway, today first two pieces complete (of sixty-four). t used to be my neighbor, maya is his neighbor now, both paint.
a few things seemed significant:
- i didn't paint today. in a way, this project, and many of my ideas, are really excuses so i can paint in a post-painting age. but i defined my role as facilitator/referee/recorder.
- there is interest. it was fun for them, fun for me, fun for innocent bystanders. can see more people wanting to get involved in this project, which is very encouraging.
- which is more important, the art or the rules? this is a project about art and rules, basically. well, the answer, today anyway, is beauty wins, aesthetic sensation wins. the first painting had an agreed-upon twenty-minute time limit which was then abolished as neither "player" felt it was finished, didn't feel done to me either, and the timeclock was relegated to neat-idea status.
- improvisation happened, that was a big hope, but you can't tell anyone what to do or how to think. rather, if you do those things, what are you doing? anyway i don't want to tell anyone what to do. certainly not when it comes to creation. none of us had ever painted on a chess board before (i still haven't) or seen it done (although i'm sure it has been done in spades). and there were ample chances before matches to set guidelines. well, they changed, and it was pretty amicable, and obvious to all of us, if something would be more interesting another way - ok an example. during the first piece, color swap - black for white, white for black. very unusual in a chess match for one player to say "ok i want to play white now, let's switch sides or flip the board around." yeah, chess teachers do that, but honest-to-goodness players, not so much i don't think. certainly not in a serious high-stakes game right? but we have two people painting, very sincere, still playful, and they decide to just swap colors. that's what a lot of art is right? making up the rules as you go along? not even the rules, just figuring out whatever you're doing? one of the things i love most about any creative practice is the improvisational element. if i already know what's going to happen or what it will look like, i don't want to do it. both the creator and the viewer can enjoy some kind of surprise, i think, something unexpected - that is very important to me, each day, to try to find something new, or to feel something new, anyway to long for that, and the fluid nature of the way each piece developed, was deeply satisfying.
so thank you t and thank you maya and josh, christine, michael, harley, very much looking forward to doing some of the things we've talked/emailed about, and also people who aren't yet in or interested or aware, i'm so much looking forward to seeing how all this plays out. even if i'm just a bystander, can't think of a better way to make art, today, this month. when all this gets combined into a piece, it's going to be a pretty complex moving painting, with a lot of visible and invisible thoughts underpining it. no idea what it will look like, i hope. i hope whatever i'm imagining is wrong. i don't want to know how this thing will go. i'm pretty excited about seeing it.
matthew is now open to collaboration (eager, even). which means... everything will change. this is a good thing. best news all day.
totally unrelated to any project, got to meet theo jansen this afternoon, inspiring as all get out.
http://www.strandbeest.com/index.html# (suggest clicking on "film" and seeing some of those clips if you haven't ever)
makes all the stuff i think about seem like a piece of cake. from the bakery. a croissant maybe, but definitely from a bakery...
that's the working title, not growth or buds, to autumn leaves and winter branches sequel. process still in process (like that?). first bit is coating some of those wooden stretcher frames with pva, attempting to prevent the wood from rotting when it gets wet. other bits, various seeds...
so chess, tomorrow first brushstrokes on that, excited. got timeclock today, brushes, boards, paint. more in mail.
haven't done a walk longer than a few miles since sunday, but about to skype matthew, we'll talk kisokaido.
some very nice traffic cones out there today.
