bound

what's good is that i was given a brief, informative, inspiring tour of the hudson hotel today. i would love to do something there, chess or something else.

aside from that, however, it was a day when i felt imprisoned by my own mind and my all-too-habitual thought patterns. between artmini options, moving-paintingness, collaborating with christine, finding places to show chess, a not-yet-public project eating at me, spring planting, summer whatever, and of course the looming massive kisokaido, i felt more confused than exhilerated.

penned-in rather than freethinking, the sort of day you hope you can put behind you by the next one.

location hunting

sometimes people ask me how i come up with projects, or how they evolve. it's always different, and i say that, and then they say yeah, but do i find the space first, or have an idea and then decide to make a piece, and then it gets a little awkward when i give an example of something i'm working on, because then it's a thing of "but i don't understand how you came up with that." so, one of the purposes of this blog, probably the main purpose, is if you're curious about how my work gets made, this should be tracking it.

where ideas come from and how thoughts make themselves known to our consciousness is one of the more basic everyday things i believe most of us have no clue about. and i pay a lot of attention to a sort of "inner voice" - any hint of a desire, if it seems to repeat itself, i'll follow instinct or intuition, and just believe that some part of me knows what it wants to do, what i'm going to want to do really, and that has really made my life feel more authentic. the more i try to figure out what i really want to do (and again part of this goes back to friendship, a long long time ago i had just a few conversations with michael, and he said, repeatedly, in a very memorable tone of voice, bluntly, "what do you want to do?") the more capable i seem to become at doing things, and the more passionate i am about my work, and the more other people seem to want to step up and help me. and sometimes i really need a hand, and it's an amazing feeling to have a friend say "yes, i'd love to help you tape and stack boxes" or "is there anything i can do?" but what triggers the impulse, it's very mysterious and i don't know. sometimes you can come up with airtight rationale in hindsight, but it's hard to believe that was the reason.

one of the triggers for chess was wandering around at night and seeing this handball court.























similar feeling to genesis of unfulfilled, this big blank canvas that so clearly wants video art on it. and during this project, incidentally, i met the wife of a man who organized a film festival to be shown on that wall, but it was cancelled - anyway, i'm not the first to feel the call of the handball court on 10th avenue at 48th street, that's for sure. this surface wants to support art. given that there are chess tables nearby, the chess project seemed to fit, this actually goes way way back, i can't quite piece the timing together clearly, but it has to do with my earliest thoughts about collaboration. if you wanted to make a painting with another person, what are some of the ways you could regulate it? brush size, sure. same amount of paint, whatever. the chess timeclock came to mind. i always enjoyed the precise fairness of chess. same number of pieces, same amount of time, who goes first is subject to chance - level playing field right?

anyway now i'm deep into chess and there has been a development or a stall depending on your point of view. my goal is to always get the work more distilled, to really make it the thing that seems to make it the most it it can be, if that makes any sense at all. thats a goal, anyway, an aspiration. make things that have integrity and somehow express the core of what they are. now, the recent body of work i've been engaged in making, as a whole, for a few years, i began to think of as moving paintings. whether they are or not is an argument in progress, between myself, olun, maybe other people, i can't tell, certainly internally, i have it every day, in this pre-nanotech crude undeveloped world of ours, without paint that actually moves, are these video-projections-on-pigment really moving paintings? can they really be thought of like that? ok so one thing that was driven home to me recently was the harder definition of painting as opposed to say drawing or photography or collage. i tend to very inclusive definitions sometimes, so a painting has been color arranged on a two-dimensional plane. what about photography? what about drawing? then you get into pigment and brush, right? and so, i want to make more painterly paintings. all of a sudden this call-of-the-handball-court and the commitment to doing chess in the park, and the painting is all there, it's this projection i need to make, is not something i can just do, just like that. a projection on a handball court would feel like video art. it wouldn't feel like a painting. and it wouldn't feel very much like chess or rules either, which are important. but what i really want to do, i want to project onto a black-and-white grid, with grey on either side of the square section. yes, that will look very chessy and very interesting and very beautiful, i hope, i believe. and anyway, that's what i want to do, even if it's boring or ugly to someone.

does the handball court still make sense? unlikely i can get permission to paint on it. hang panels? drape with fabric? hours of nervous thinking. the big one lately has been "what if it rains?" i have this fear of my laptop and projector getting wet, and that's it, no more art for the evening, folks. nightmare. so, re-evaluating, yes, there's probably a way to do this thing at that site. but is that site so important? i'm starting to think no, that's not the most important thing. the way the paintings were made, and the actual construction of the actual piece, that's what important. actually i believe that once complete it can be shown pretty much anywhere in the world. electricity and lack of water pouring onto the equipment would be prerequisites, but otherwise i can conceive of a limited edition of sixty-four new media installations.

so starting with the first one, back to hell's kitchen, to the birth of these paintings, and now i'm looking for somewhere to show. so yes this piece started off in a way because of a location which was calling for art, not just to me. but now the piece just wants to get out of my head and studio and computer and do it's i'm-art-look-at-me thing. i think. i believe.

here's hell's kitchen:
http://hellskitchen.net/hkmap.html

hell's kitchen park isn't on that map, but it's pretty much dead-center. some other parks are listed here:
http://www.hellskitchennyc.com/

but does it even need to be a park? somewhere it can be up for longer than a night, maybe a month, wouldn't that be better? and somewhere the rain doesn't fall on the laptop, that would be nice, too. maybe project through a window onto a big painting, or maybe do something translucent hanging in a window and the projector is deeper in the building - so, yeah, looking for that place.

some initial thoughts today:

this hospital might be great. not only do they host the community board meetings:
http://www.manhattancb4.org/index.html
but one of my nieces was born there. could project from inside through that center window. already chess-grid pattern.

















one drawback, view from across the street not so great during leafy seasons.


















hudson hotel is nice and dark inside, with lots of beautiful spaces, but it's not super-public. would be a great space for something.

















time warner center - well, there are a lot of great windows, that's for sure. and it's nearby. but it doesn't feel like hell's kitchen. and i bet they really just want advertisers. but i can approach them.























anyway this isn't list-narrowing time, it's consider-some-options time, and if i still feel that roosevelt hospital makes more sense than the handball court at hell's kitchen park on sunday, might be time to change the plan and figure out who to talk to.

one advantage of wandering around looking for a good place to show chess is the opportunity to view traffic cones i wouldn't otherwise encounter. (with these, it's all about the surroudings, the colors and textures and materials that are distinctly not orange and plastic.)






















to close, here's a self portrait, with cone. goodnight.

time is a finite resource

even when we live forever, every moment will be emailing-not-painting or eating-not-walking or...

can't do everything.

progress report

chess:
http://www.eriksanner.com/es_blog_2007/chess_070613.pdf

second perspective drawing class (of ten):






















bonus = walked around the block on break and happened upon this faded albino cone (looks a little bit like it was manufactured in a deep subterranean pit where cones are slowly grown from a combination of accretive mineral deposits and patient funghi):

limits

technology has spawned reproduction. and vice-versa. right? never easy to come to grips with "limited editions." (me anyway.)

chess was going to be a site-specific one-time thing. now i'm thinking there will be a limited edition of sixty-four different new-media installations and an unlimited edition of something or other. (the first is very clear in my head, how they'll differ, how they'll be made, what they'll look like.)

all day i've been thinking about limitations - this "limited edition" thing has bugged me for a long time. hard to see the value in limiting dvds or vhs tapes (back in the day) - what, is each one lovingly hand-pressed by the artist? but other limitations you want them, you need them - if nothing else, so that a project gets defined, and you can move on, after it comes to a sort of conclusion or completion.

i think i'll have an open studio, and show an example of the chess limited edition, and maybe by then, have some further development on what an unlimited edition chess piece will consist of or be.

matthew and i wanted to skype for longer than thirty minutes last night, but there wasn't time - i couldn't invite as many people to paint on chessboards in the park as i wanted to, you need permits for groups larger than twenty, and i didn't want to do more than sixty-four boards (yes, the wetwork is now done, it's on to editing and programming, plus the other physical bits still being worked out).

there is a choice you have to make, a big one, as an artist. prolificity. maybe it's not conscious, maybe you don't do the authentic thing coming from you, but it's there, you have to face it. when i first got to know greg a bit, he was saying that if he had to start his career all over again, he would rather be like vermeer and have a small body of work which is all fully realized than explore different ideas and produce so many large canvasses. but i wonder if his personal breakthroughs could have been achieved without all that other painting, leading to it.

you can say that anyone's entire life's work is a limited edition of one, a single body of work. there will only be as much as you do. why would you want to do less than what you are capable of? no need for artificial limitations, there are plenty of external constraints. what can you do, within the limits of this universe?

kisokaido = moving?

so the argument for video earlier was basically "hey you could record a lot of what you see." and this was reinforced last night when i saw a woman, a well-dressed together-looking middle-aged professional-looking woman walking swiftly in high heels turn her head and emit a powerful stream of vomit into the street, in midtown. wow. ok so then another one does the same thing, maybe five seconds later. both barely pause, just keep on going. would you want to see that?

but the tension between the still and the moving. if i say "hey this one cone near tastes like chicken looks like it's bleeding"






















if that's video, what's the advantage, camera movement from unsteady hand?

these cones in a garden by the boat basin, do you want to see the flowers moving in the breeze?
























this looks like - well, it's a water balloon.























but you don't get the weirdness of how frequently, having met him, i keep running into david, or the largeness of the splash, that this is all happening at jack the pelican...

matthew and i just skyped, we were talking about lessening our loads, no computer, no video camera, i never used to take a camera travelling ever, just wanted to experience things directly and maybe remember them in the future...

so is writing the answer? this water balloon image, i actually have a nice video clip of it, but it's the sort of thing where all of a sudden you're influencing events, would it have been as theatrical without being documented?

isn't writing, umm, sort of, ummm... ok so i've been doing a lot of visual art. right? and visual art, anyone can more-or-less immediately experience it, right? different time periods, different geographies, different cultural backgrounds, we can still, most of us, most places on the planet, see the same thing, pretty quickly. writing, not so much.

accept video and that's what it's going to be, video? equipment, and time-consuming nature of production? maybe matthew is writing something and i'm doing a video something and the only collaboration is that we're walking? no, that sounds very wrong.

ok, so thinking, many more days to solve dilemmas or find what it is that we want to do. but moving pictures, moving prints, moving paintings, straight video - seems like i won't be able to avoid it? (traffic cones of the kisokaido?)

still conveys fine that "huh?" when you stumble across bread and milk on an industrial building shuttered windowsill.






















but not the blinking of the lizard on the man's head, next to you on the subway bench.






















combinations? focus more on movement or stillness?

what do you really want to do?

what did hiroshige really want to do?

all this was just maybe two hours of walking today, we're going to be doing more like eight...

there are no rules for this sort of thing, are there. our lives, we pretty much make them up as we go along. our art, it's arbitrary. you can take from tradition, you can give to tradition, but you're going to be confronted, over and over, with very fundamental decisions, about what you want to do.

and before they're decisions, they're vague unsettling notions...

eva and wes

sibling rivalry/cooperation

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.