that moment

camera set up in a room with a lot of color.























yet the working-space was very black-and-white friendly.






















later on was surprised to find a painting trying to escape the board, but still remaining true to its two-dimensionality.























nothing, though, will stick in my memory like that one moment. no picture, but the feeling you get, when you're making tea, and you look over at your desk, and someone is painting on your chair - that's a really unique and interesting and unusual moment. i don't know what prepares you for that in your life. it's the sort of thing that makes you think "hey, it's not even noon, and this project isn't completed by a month or two, but what else do you want to experience?"























every project is packed full of those moments, where something happens that maybe no one will ever know about, but it impacts everything, i think. the rest of my life will now occur with that memory, of that moment. i think it will make a difference.

au revoir

one thing that came up this morning is this idea that one of the things people think might be hard about being an artist is saying bye-bye to your work when it leaves your studio and goes out into the world. i have met people who claim to want to be artists but say they can't bear to sell their paintings.

there are several crucial benefits to having other people or institutions collect your work. one of those is the idea that this will cement your relationship with another person. some very good friends of mine also share the dual role as patron. if they burnt my paintings on a whim it wouldn't affect our friendship - we are friends. other collectors, maybe i don't know them that well. i can't call them and say "hey, you're remodelling? can i come and do a new-media installation in your living room, and destroy your wall, and spend a week wandering around your home in a daze trying to figure out what art piece i want to create in this ephemeral space?" but since my work is with them, in a way you can say that we have a relationship. it's not necessarily "friend." it's not "well, we're all going to become the borg, so we might as well start trying to meet everyone on the planet (even if that's not our natural inclination) and all get to know each other really well because we're going to be increasingly intimate with everybody all the time." what is it? it's a relationship. and that specific relationship can't exist if you're not willing to let go of what you create.

another one has to do with what art is. vineel and i used to argue about making some perfect imaginary thing in a cave somewhere. this is college i think, old old conversation. but art doesn't exist if it's not shared between maker and viewer. i'm not saying the audience can't participate in the creation of work, but i don't believe that art which exists in solitude is art. i'm sure somebody out there can make a compelling argument for art forms which you pursue by yourself for yourself, but i'm sure i could come back with an argument that whatever hypothetical act that would be, it wouldn't be art. it might be related to the artistic impulse, it might be creative, or allow the imagination to play an active role, but it wouldn't be art.

so, as i bid adieu to these pieces, i'm thinking hard about what it is we all want, what it is i want, who we are, who i am, what is going to happen.

we're going to stay in touch. forever. i'm going to keep making art, there's nothing i want to do more than that in this universe. and i'm going to hang up my laundry and take a shower. just keeping things real.























untitled, 24" x 24", egg tempera, pvc glue, acrylic gesso, canvas, and oil paint on canvas, 2001



















untitled, 12" x 16", oil on untreated canvas, 2002

public

david hockney isn't one of those people i think about every day. maybe once a month. i'm a fan, but he's not on my mind in the same way that dekoonig or rothko are.

some years ago, there was a [grand] [massive] [killer] [stellar] [awesome] [enlightening] [inspiring] retrospective of his work in tokyo (probably travelled from somewhere else, don't remember). this is in the late nineties. anyway, i picked up his autobiography, and opened it to some random page, and a sentence jumped out at me. (please do not let me know this was on the back cover, let's keep my memory pure and unpolluted even if it's wrong.) he said something about having completed (or undertaken) his education in public. and this got me very excited - it wasn't about what i knew or didn't know or could or couldn't do, it was about going ahead and trying to expand the things that i can in fact do. john ronsheim taught me that you sing to learn, not to show off. this was a pointed reminder that engaging in artmaking need not be confused with virtuosity, skill, craft, talent, but is a pursuit. you can only chase and search and hunt.

so that thought, educating myself in public, became sort of an inner mantra. it's ok that my pieces aren't as skillfully executed as they might be. are they getting better? is the work getting stronger? as long as i'm comfortable that progress is being made, then i want to keep pushing on.

ray says that one trend we can start to accept is that ever-increasing amounts of time in our professional activities will be spent learning.

privacy is over. we're all getting increasingly public educations.

auspicious

i adore this postcard.





























thank you. found it particularly auspicious that this confusing thing met me a few minutes prior to the first session of the as-yet-unnamed inquiry into the purpose or function of art.

and very much enjoyed that as a few of us gathered at cafe forant to face a big question, a tree branch fell. read this as an encouraging omen, nature offering a bit of herself as both raw material and inspirational art fodder. so, here we have a contemporary "flower arrangement" - back in the day you wouldn't have seen two plastic cups, with a tree branch, and a plastic straw, and ice, right? very ephemeral, and the wind made sure of that, art is not eternal and nothing is static in this universe.






















a few points touched on this evening, without much detail or connection. progress was made, no summation seems appropriate. context is important; extracting the general from the particular (or expressing the particular through the general); exercising the imaginative faculty; evolutionary necessity; the phillistine nature of brute representation as a motivating force; concentrative zenness state; interhuman empathetic rubic device.

commitmentphobia

in so many ways, it's much nicer to imagine how things might be, then to drag them down into the muck of reality. of course, the reverse is possible too - you worry about how painful it will be to go shoe shopping, and all of a sudden, you're wearing sandals that feel like magic wind-funneling hiking slippers. ok a bit of a disconnect maybe between "i imagine making something but think when it becomes an actuality it might feel sullied" and "i dread this task which is actually quite pleasant" - but similar case of fear, procrastination, joyful acceptance of resulting reality once impetus has been acted upon and the universe has hopefully been improved. yes, we're all in the let's-make-things-better business, i think, at one level or another.

right, relevance to anything? chess. date. rain. permission. surface. rain dates? rain-or-shine and prepare for the worst?

http://www.eriksanner.com/chess.html
http://www.eriksanner.com/chess_070604.pdf

so i had a very clear idea when i started the chess piece. about how tough it would be to actually do the paintings, to find people who were interested, how ugly they would all look, and then how easy it would be to actually show it. the paintings themselves are just components in the making of the piece, like movie props. the new-media installation is the result, a computer-processed video projection which always looks different, a moving painting, something you could stand in front of for five years without seeing the same combination of fluid images. piece of cake to show - since it was to be made near this massive handball court at a park around the corner from my place, just plug in the machines and let them do their thing - two hours later off, unplug, carry home, boom, done.






















ah, those were the days. whenever that was. end of october.

so of course my imaginings = way off. yes it was easy to find willing painters. what they have done is by and large beautiful. yes it was fun to set up and take down that part. projecting onto that wall? that wall is white. clearer and clearer in my head is this image: the surface projected on must be painted. it must be an eight-by-eight black-and-white grid (like a chessboard) with rectangles on either side.

so now, how to do that, in public? hang panels from handball court? when it rains, just let my laptop and projector die? and so the easy part gets hard, after the hard part was easy. find an indoor space? painting was public, in the park, for the public, in the public park. public space in hell's kitchen? build a little canopy-structure and keep it up for a week?

in order for that "tentative" date to become solid, i need to figure out the real plan. in order to apply for a permit and make this happen, i need to commit to a real plan.

what is it good for?

still getting there. ("good" for?)

incidental / age of plastic

at first didn't really think these things were connected. and maybe they're not, chance of contrived-for-blog right? anyway i take a lot of pictures. downoad to desk machine frequently, often daily. habit.

one of the ways i think people can enjoy viewing traffic cones is by entering a heightened state of observation - if you're walking around looking at something, or for something, other things will jump out at you, things you wouldn't likely otherwise notice. i imagine birdwatchers experience this with trees and clouds and things. certainly in museums i've had the experience of noticing a particularly striking circuit box or other structural component not intended to be viewed aesthetically as part of the exhibit.

plastic? went to buy glacine, so i can stack the dry chess boards and they won't stick to each other and the paintings will be safe from dust. have been trying to figure out how to show chess, keeps changing a little bit. all of a sudden have been thinking that plastic might be a good solution.






















this is a big change. i used to use the word plastic as an insult. plastic was bad, wood was good. now, very near the plastic seller and the glacine merchant was this traffic cone.

















hey, traffic cones are plastic, i'm really into traffic cones, i've actually been pro-plastic for over a decade without realizing it. internalized but never aware.

so, if traffic cones are almost art, what about this?

















and i think, i was born into the age of plastic? because this is a glass bottle and a metal can. i do remember those things. plastic already feels old, but when my mom and dad were little, did they have legos? tinkertoys would have been more likely.

so on the way to accomplish some of the more mundane tasks necessitated by artmaking (materials selection and purchasing in order to create and maintain work) i incidentally became aware that i am a plastic child born into a plastic time, through incidental traffic cone observation, and wanting to share that.

all of this somehow seems related to inquiries into the purpose of art, which has been on my mind, but goodnight.

approaches

people or problems? intended to ask for help with a technical challenge. in seeking to communicate what i want to do, my issue seems to have offered a solution.

can't you just compromise?

no.

feasible

possible to walk the twenty-five miles per day, i think. (kisokaido.) after fourteen yesterday did twenty-three today.















got to see some exceptional traffic cones.






















but frankly almost gave up. ron was very motivating, especially on the last stretch when he started to utilize the baseball he found. don't want to let it drop and all of a sudden you're moving fast without realizing it, nice tactic.























maybe the biggest thing, though, was being asked, at the barbecue, why i was preparing for this kyoto-tokyo j-walk. didn't want to talk about the art project because that's still being worked out. i mean at this stage it's still really "i want to do something with matthew" and "i'm pretty sure it's going to involve video." and after not answering very thoughtfully, very fixated on jong's food and the beverages and saying hi to tim and all that, started to remember.

matthew told me he was thinking of walking the kisokaido (nakasendo). what struck me is that he said he'd always wanted to do it. since high school or college i think, whenever he first learned about it, early in his fascination with j-land. after learning from him that hiroshige had done a series of woodblock prints, i thought "join and do something." then comes the part that's stuck in my head today. after a week or two or three of general talking about the walk, he sounded not very resolute, not at all. sort of "if i'm going to take three weeks and spend some money, aren't there other things i'd rather do?" but i had heard him say, he had always wanted to do this. and that made me want to do it. because we all have these things we really want to do. maybe it's hard or maybe it seems illogical or maybe you have to look at a calendar and set a date, not in a year or two, but this year. yet these creeping doubts will surface. is this the right thing?

i believe matthew will grow and learn on this journey and treasure the experience. me too. dual gratitude. yes i have this agenda of wanting to make art. but that's my thing i've always wanted to do. he has always wanted to walk from kyoto to tokyo. isn't that inspiring? that somebody wants to train and map and plan an ambitious trip like that?

the thought of being near a yearning, an unfulfilled goal... maybe proximity to chasing something is what's driving me.