Flashback to January/2012: Melt/ Crystalize

During the only significant snowfall of this past winter, I made a snowball with a red/pink center, then used a heat gun to slowly melt it.

I recorded the process.  Sadly, the camera's battery ran out and the sun went down before I could completely melt the snowball, but I used the footage I got to make a video.  I sped up the footage to four times its original rate and reversed it so that it ends up as a fully formed snowball again.  Here's a low-res version of that video:

Here are some process stills I pulled from the video recording (note how much clearer they are...stupid video file size limits...): 

And here are some images I took during the act itself: 

It was a pretty spontaneous thing--when I did it, I was thinking about using heat to carve out an architectural interior space in the snow over time, without ever touching the snow.  The color was a playful element--I thought it would be more exciting if there was a reveal involved in the process.  It also made it sort of bodily, like the snow was bleeding, or growing orifices.  When I showed it to my class, the professor suggested that there was some sexual tension between the heat gun and the responsive snow.  I honestly hadn't been thinking consciously about that dynamic when I made this, but I can definitely see how he got there.  This is an important piece for me to look back on because it was my first concrete experiment with video as a medium, and because it involved me performing an action.

The List, Installment 6: Assemblage

Today's installment is gonna get ugly. Visceral, disgusting, ephemeral--I'm talking entropy. I'm talking shit that pushes the boundaries of what constitutes Art. I'll start with someone familiar

Robert Rauschenberg:

Bed, 1955

Charlene, 1954

Monogram. 1955-9

Canyon, 1959

Rauschenberg wasn't afraid to get messy. His combines incorporated found objects, including underwear, bedsheets, and taxidermy animals, giving the paint a bodily, sometimes scatological feel. And this was the 50s, mind you

Bruce Conner:

Couch, 1963

Looking Glass, 1964

Child, 1959-60

Creepy right? Conner favors nylon stockings, costume jewelry and fur in his pieces. Dark, twisted, disturbing, violent. Check, check, check, check. But look at how the fetishized materials communicate content.

Edward Kienholz:

Roxys, 1961

The Hoerengracht, 1983-88

The Beanery, 1965

The State Hospital, 1966

Back Seat Dodge '38, 1964

Kienholz made tableaux depicting macabre representations of bars, brothels, the seedy underpinnings of daily existence. These pieces are unavoidable attacks that expose society's twisted secrets. Plus, resin just makes everything disturbing.

Paul Thek:

Fishman in Excelcis Table, 1971-2

Peter Hujar, Thek Studio Shoot Face of the Tomb Effigy 6, 1967

Untitiled (Hand with Ring), 1967

Meat Sculpture with Butterflies, 1966

Untitled, 1966

I recently saw the Paul Thek show at the Whitney (which is up until Jan 9th, so go see it if you haven't). His meat sculptures are some of the most delightfully revolting things I've ever seen in person. They're made of resin, beads, human hair, among other things, and are encased in plexi boxes. A couple even had big ol' plastic flies accompanying the festering "flesh". They're nauseatingly convincing. In a good way. Thek also made full body casts which he used to create alter egos for himself including the Dead Hippie and Fishman. I stood under the Fishman piece, mentally willing one of the flimsier bits of laytex to fall on me. The curatorial intern said it would have been highly possible.

Wow, there's a lot of testosterone in this post...Next post I'll have to call out Carolee Schneemann to represent...

The List, Installment 3: Sculpture

I just came from sculpture class, the current project for which involves taking apart a found object and reassembling it. I chose a sweater. I'm unraveling a sweater. By hand. Thread by thread. It's probably the most insane thing I've chosen to do with my time, and I'm pretty sure it's ruining my eyesight, but it's also fascinating to spend hours making my way through all of the minute details of an ordinary object that was probably woven by a machine in mere minutes. So anyway, I've built a couple of armatures out of wire in the interest of wrapping the unraveled thread (the reassembly portion of the assignment) once I've done the slow work of taking it apart. My professor characterized what I'm doing as "making 3D paintings," which makes me really happy. Still no images of new stuff to post yet--I should be building at least one 5'x8' stretcher this weekend, as well as finishing my wood relief painting and some more paper cutout pieces, so it shouldn't be too long. But in the meantime, let's take a break from the overwhelming sea of captivating paintings on The List and look at some sculptural work, shall we?

Hans Arp:






A lot of the shapes in this work actually remind me of Matisse's later abstract drawings. Arp did paintings too, but I've been looking a lot at his reliefs.

Richard Tuttle:




Hans Richter:



Kurt Schwitters:Schwitters' work is pretty dominated by collage, but this piece, Merzbau, is one of the coolest things I've ever read about. He essentially turned his living space into a collage. He just accumulated stuff and formed it into an aesthetic space, and lived inside his art. Yeah.

Constantin Brancusi:


For me, no discussion of sculpture is complete until I've brought up Bird In Space. It's just so exquisitely simple! There's a gorgeous room at the PMA (Philadelphia Museum of Art) filled with Brancusi sculptures and Mondrian paintings. It'll change your life.

I guess that's all for today. I could mention Giacometti or Rodin, but my love of them is not really directly related to anything I'm doing right now, so I'll resist.