THE TÖWELBUCH

Töwelbuch

A work of art can be cluttered or sparse.  Either way, it can still be harmonious.  The challenge is to apply this rule of harmoniousness to the creative act.  How can I maximize my resources?  These resources include not only materials, but also time, physical energy, clarity of vision and emotional fortitude.

A major question for the artist is “how do I best express my idea?”  Say I decide to express my idea in paint on canvas.  My goal is to express the idea in a so balanced a fashion that all the annoying, disruptive bits cancel each other out and I am left with one clear statement.  Very good.  However, there is a problematic side-effect.  My painting process includes the use of old bath towels.  So after a few years of painting I must ask myself another question: “what am I going to do with all these towels?”

the painter's towels

There are two answers.  I could throw them out or I could make further art out of them.  One thinks of composting.  An artist is an urban farm: urban, because cities are fertile with the surplus monies and audience necessary to sustain art; and farm because, like a farmer, an artist must produce. Farming is an art that produces food.  The artist and the farmer share many of the same concerns.

For example, both artist and farmer must consider the carrying capacity of their resources.  A classic, Jeffersonian, family farm thrives on the judicious use of its land.  Furthermore, the small farm thrives on diversity and the symbiotic relationships facilitated by the nurturing of different crops and different animals.  Likewise, artists, if they so choose, can discover the utility of various media, some of which are created as the by-products of another branch of their creative output.  For example, scraps of unused canvas from painting can be used in some other work even if they no longer have potential as painting surfaces.  If the artist can find the beauty or at least utility of the scraps, then the only additional expense is the time spent putting them together artfully or patching holes in the roof of a squat.

Repurposing is one way for an artist to maintain carrying capacity.  It only requires that the artist start with the medium, rather than the idea.  And necessity can yield results, maybe even beautiful ones.  There was a period when Picasso had too much blue paint. He used his surplus blue the way a farmer will nurture life out of hay.

And speaking of compost, here is what I did with the towels.  First, I conditioned them.  I washed them, so that only the image adhering to the surface remained, and they got soft and fluffy,

Wash-machines are in the basement.

and then I gave them some air.

airing the towels

Then, I bound then together as a book.

towel codex binding

Töwelbuch opening

The book structure is a variation of the medieval codex – the text block sewn together over bands sewn into covers, the contents are pure action painting totally free of rational control, and the medium is towels.  As far as I know, the Töwelbuch is the first artist's book totally suitable for the bath – a repurposed-double-elephant-post-modern-steam-punk-folio unique.  I could go on to make many claims about it, but suffice it to say that while it may be tidy or beautiful or ugly or large, it serves no purpose other than to be.  It is no longer suitable as a desiccant.  Nor is it edible.

THE MATHS

qed

Repurposing is a good way to save on the cost of materials.  I recently saw a thing about a guy in Australia who makes ingenious animal forms out of used auto parts.  And it’s one way in which art triumphs over cooking, where repurposing causes food poisoning.  Maybe the artist will stop when she uses up all her stock of materials.  And it would be better if all the materials got used up evenly.  In other words, the resources that go into the creation of an object and the action of creating that object can be dictated by the principle of balance, just as the elements of the finished product should combine to produce a harmonious ideal.

That is to say, a work of art originates in an idea, which, through a process, becomes a product.  The artist is alone in determining the rules and decisions and methodologies that drive the process.  An exception to this is exemplified by artists who have their own factories with employees answering to a designer.  In that case, the artist’s only job is to have the idea.  But such cases are rare.  So, if the driving principle is balance, and this principle not only determines the look of the finished product but also applies to the resources that contribute to the object’s creation, then anything repurposed contributes to the artist’s objective because repurposing reduces disorder in the studio.

Simply put, the objective is a sum total of one – one piece, comprising values in a harmonious state, with nothing left on the side.

Practically speaking, this is impossible.  The challenge of achieving an art piece of perfect, self-contained harmony produces the additional challenge of half-empty paint tubes, unused scraps, busted brushes and used cleaning products – all the stuff that slowly drifts towards those bins on the side.  Nevertheless, the more the logarithm of creation approaches one, the closer the artist gets to her ideal of balance.

Although, in fact, assuming the artist wants to trade art for a living, the true objective is zero: a completely empty studio.  Not only is it green, it is also aesthetically satisfying, and if the artist is lucky enough to have turned all that material into food, then all that mass has been converted into energy, which boosts the artist’s chance of survival, and is in pleasing accordance with the laws of physics.

Here we see an example of utilitarian art, which can be espressed mathmatically, where x=art and y=utility, as x + y = 0.  And as I have often been told, all things are one, or, espressed mathmatically, 0 + ∞ = 1.
QED

THE GIRL WHO QUIT SMOKING

Butt Soap

Though recently I’ve been thinking there is more to it than that.  There is also the fact that the artistic process is an impulse.  Maybe on an unconscious level art satisfies my compulsive need to tidy.  For example, art is a great way to repurpose old junk.

Then again, those are really different things.  Take, first, the impulse to tidy.  There is something very satisfying about washing up and containing things at home or at work.  In much the same way, there is something very satisfying about putting a line next to or around a smudge, because it contains the smudge.  And both tidying and art require resources: containers, detergent, vacuum, bags, ink, paint.  In the process of cleaning a kitchen, we transform chaos into order, with bags of mess on the side.  In the process of creating an object, we start out by making a mess out of some stuff we have, probably prepackaged, and then we clean it up, putting some of it back in the package, throwing some of it into the bags on the side, and transforming some of the mess into a third thing, a thing that contains some of the mess and expresses it or tastes like it.   And we say “that was my point.”

But in order to make the mess that produces the third thing, we need to buy supplies.  I want to make an ink drawing on paper.  I buy ink and paper, and then I make a drawing, and then I have almost a whole bottle of ink left, and the rest of a pad of paper.  The only way to tidy it all is to make more paintings.  Boom.  By nature of my impulse to tidy I’m hooked.  

This is a tautology caused by mass production.  The story of the girl who quit smoking is a parable of this tautology.  She decided to smoke just one.  So she bought a whole pack, because an individual cigarette cannot be bought, and when it can it costs a dollar and much more in energy, sometimes exacerbated by shame.  So now she had a whole pack of smokes.  She smoked one, and, true to her word, she didn't smoke any more for the rest of the day. But the next day she still had most of a pack of cigarettes, unless she has given it away.  Chances are probably 50% (?) she still had it.  She decided to keep it in her freezer and only have one once in a while.  So, even if she succeeds in slowly weaning herself off cigarettes, the box remains in the freezer, adding to the total disorder, along with waffles.  If she does not eat all the waffles, if she does not smoke all the cigarettes, it will be a waste.  Which would be, at best, uneconomical, at worst, mentally disturbing.

Which leads to another, more fundamental problem, which is you can’t eat art.  For basic survival, the best you can do with the matter of art is convert it into energy, or build a shelter, maybe out of stretched canvases or photonegative plates.  But that would not be as plush as living in a condo, forged from an old iron shop into a fully stocked machine, a block away from a bistro where the drinks have their own menu.  So the artist is left in a quandary.  On the one hand her creation is priceless.  The trick is to get the owner of the bistro to believe it is worth a wedge of baguette (smeared with something chopped compulsively tidy and small).  On the other hand the manager of the bistro would sooner exchange bread for her government notes than for her love beads.  In fact, with fiat currency, she doesn’t even have to ask to see the manager, unless she wants to, for her own entertainment.  Entertainment is something that is not really essential to survival but still highly prized (just look at the food in this bistro – it’s fun, and pricey).

It can be stressful to make either choice.  Either you leave all your stuff moldering in a closet and earn fiat somewhere else, or you spend the day tidying the mess by sticking it all together and then you try to trade it for a chicken.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Echo in progress

Contemporary artists have the liberty to tell a story in which the narrative is not imposed.  Such stories can speak to everyone.  My favorite works of art are those that can impart a common experience or emotion to any audience, even when removed from their native context.  These works often rely on materials that transcend our most immediate surroundings, such as myth, the collective unconscious or nature in its broadest sense.

My guiding principle in all creative work is balance.  In making pictures I strive for a balance between imaginative and reactive.  I love works of art that stress composition without sacrificing a sense of improvisation.  I also seek a balance between content and style - works that simultaneously engage the mind and impress the eye.  In modern art I am most drawn to the pieces that seek to reconcile the objective and non-objective traditions – works that acknowledge an historical continuum while at the same time exercising the freedoms born out of the anti-establishment impulses of the twentieth century.

For example, in some of my work I juxtapose landscapes with inscapes, playing with double-exposure effects in an attempt to depict my physical surroundings and their effect on my imagination simultaneously.  Or, I have made various attempts to depict, in a series, the Library of Congress Classification System, a modern device that, though it only seeks to classify library materials, virtually mirrors the mind of man from the primordial to the present.  I have treated this highly rationalized system in a non-objective way.  These representations are freely associated, distorted, abstracted and exaggerated – a personal taxonomy of response.

My goal is to infuse a narrative conception, given its traditional tools of form and perspective, with the late twentieth-century sensibility that art should not dictate experience but serve as a place to start.