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NEW BLOG

“The Puritan” is now “Wrecking Ball.”

Not that you had this bookmarked.

sad bastard

I think I finally started to get somewhere with the business of concretizing an artist’s statement, tonight. More on that later (I have a really, really shitty first draft, but that’s a pretty huge first step for me), but I’m awfully tired, and I just want to keep a couple of terms in mind for a time when I have more energy to devote to things other than cleaning, packing, and freaking-the-hell-out about the logistics of the next two months:

The fort/da game of the prior post is one,
Reification Fallacy is another.
My own homebrew conception of “metonymic collapse” as a function of contemporary representation is another, closely tied with the aforementioned rhetorical fallacy.

I think I’m working through a broad trajectory concerning how one thing comes to stand in for another. The object-relationship engendered by stuffed animals as a stand-in for human interaction (potential and imagined); Chalk ground on a flexible support (upholstered canvas, crocheted birds) as a stand in for impermanence and the anxieties that it, in turn, engenders; oil on copper as a stand-in for something as unfathomable as “permanence”; in my camera obscura video, the image of my front yard projected on a hanging bedsheet, inverted and strange, as a stand-in for the outside world. “Fallacy” becomes a pretty compelling common thread. Perfect Lovers as a wholly-perfect/entirely-inadequate stand-in for two real people: two blackened copper saucers as a stand-in for a relationship between two people that is irreconcilably over.

To bed, to bed.

o-o-o-o

“At this point I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities I mean in children’s play.

“The different theories of children’s play have only recently been summarized and discussed from the psycho-analytic point of view by Pfeifer (1919), to whose paper I would refer my readers. These theories attempt to discover the motives which lead children to play, but they fail to bring into the foreground the economic motive, the consideration of the yield of pleasure involved. Without wishing to include the whole field covered by these phenomena, I have been able, through a chance opportunity which presented itself to throw some light upon the first game played by a little boy of one and a half and invented by himself. It was more than a mere fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated.

“The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a ‘good boy. He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o,’ accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word ‘fort’ ['gone']. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ ['there]. This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act.

“The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. It is of course a matter of indifference from the point of view of judging the effective nature of the game whether the child invented it himself or took it over on some outside suggestion. Our interest is directed to another point. The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending.

“No certain decision can be reached from the analysis of a single case like this. On an unprejudiced view one gets an impression that the child turned his experience into a game from another motive. At the outset he was in a passive situation he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not. But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone’ might satisfy an impulse of the child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: ‘right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.’ A year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor, exclaiming: ‘Go to the fwont!’ He had heard at that time that his absent father was ‘at the front’, and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother. We know of other children who liked to express similar hostile impulses by throwing away objects instead of persons. We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle. For, in the case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.

“Nor shall we be helped in our hesitation between these two views by further considering children’s play. It is clear that in their play children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and that in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the situation. But on the other hand it is obvious that all their play is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time the wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do. It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play. If the doctor looks down a child’s throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute.

“Nevertheless, it emerges from this discussion ‘that there is no need to assume the existence of a special imitative instinct in order to provide a motive for play. Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which have a yield of pleasure as their final outcome, should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject-matter. They are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it.”

-Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

so, it’s been a bit doldrummy.

Nothing all that much to report. I’m woefully behind in the whole cleaning/packing effort. I’m dragging my feet on the website I’m working on (for actual money, no less! I haven’t had any of that come my way in months). So what do I work on? Why, a new piece, of course! That’s what a real artist would do. Christmas. I wonder when, if ever, I’ll be able to refer to myself as an “artist” without cringing a little, on the inside. I mean, it’s not like calling oneself a “doctor,” where you get a degree that officially permits you to refer to yourself as such. Any damn schmuck can self-identify as “artistic.” That pisses me off. What good is a title if there’s no licensing? No oversight? Shameful.

Anyway! Moving on. This is what I’m working on. It’s to be called, I think, “FDP (for Joan Didion and Félix González-Torres).” It’s those two shallow copper dishes I bought a couple weeks ago. I’ve since oil primed the bacs of them, and am presently engaged with glazing (and glazing and glazing and glazing and glazing) them until they’re a nice, deep black (the glaze is actually a mixture of raw umber and indathrone blue–I don’t know the rationale, really, but I still avoid using tube black, like they taught me in the learning-house).

Not much to look at, right now, I know. But in time. In time. I gave up on actually using a brush to glaze them. My fan brush is getting on towards needing to be replaced, and I couldn’t get an even coat. So I just mixed up a whole jar of darkness, and have been pouring it on directly. The title. Right. “FDP” is medical shorthand for “fixed and dilated pupils.” When a patient’s pupils are fully dilated and unresponsive to light stimuli, it’s almost always a sign of imminent and inevitable brain death. Joan Didion talks about it a couple of times in The Year of Magical Thinking, and, if you’ve had the misfortune of ever seeing it, you’ll know it can be the kind of image that sticks with you. González-Torres because it’s going to be two circles, and as I’ve already said, two identical circles always equal Perfect Lovers (aka probably the best, if not the most “important,” work of art in the history of just about ever).

The surface is a bit mottled, at the moment (dust, air bubbles). I’m hoping that a couple liberal dousings of varnish (probably damar with a boatload of stand oil to thicken it up) will take care of that.

In other news, I’ll have my first appearance in print, soon. Sort of. Kind of. Not really. Err, since I’m assuming print-on-demand doesn’t really count. That magazine cover I mentioned. I send the final image to the coordinator-woman this morning. I think it came out pretty handsome.

Now, since I don’t live in Winnipeg, I won’t actually get to see the thing unless someone decides to mail me a copy. But ‘tevs. It’s still nice.

Interlocutor

I’m thinking about un-disowning some of the paintings I did at MICA.  I dragged them out of the closet to look at them, since I wasn’t sure if I wanted to include one or two of them in my little introductory slide show thing at Windsor (for a point of reference as to how crazy I am, I’ve actually been rehearsing what I plan on saying every night when I’m lying in bed–this is just like a five minute deal, and all I plan to say is “Hello, I’m Steven. I’m from Florida and I got my BFA at MICA,” and then cut to slides. Really, not something that needs rehearsing). I figured it might be useful, but really? I’m just looking to prove that my work did have some kind of “edge,” at some point, anyway. Clearly I have little else to do with my free time other than fret about all the ways people might not like me.

Anyway, it isn’t that I really lost faith in the blackface paintings. I stopped making them because the circumstances of my life changed, and I didn’t have the stamina for that kind of work, anymore. Also, I had to leave all of my oil paints in Baltimore when I came back to Tampa. And they were kind of Baltimore-specific, anyway. Granted, critiques were a headache–painting faculty who could only bring themselves to talk about paint handling (my biscuits? oh, that burned them); that guy who referred to me as “that guy who painted himself blue; dozens of people who couldn’t stop telling me how funny they were, and one or two people who just told I was a racist, pure and simple (that was actually the only criticism I got that could potentially be valid–I hope it isn’t, but I can’t say I didn’t see it coming)–but I only took them off my site because a) they don’t really… mesh with what I do now, and they would have been distracting; and b) I didn’t really want to talk about them anymore.

But looking at them again, now, I’m kind of taken aback at how good they are. I’ve been out of oil painting for so long that it’s a bit shocking to realize that I am (or was) actually quite good at it (I apologize, my modesty tends to falter considerably as regards my work–I assure you, gentle reader, that it’s always a shock when things turn out well, but I don’t care to denigrate what I do for the sake of decorum–I spend quite enough time trashing everything else I do. I’ve also been known to find ways of working my SAT scores [1500] into casual conversation, but that’s just because I’m kind of a dick sometimes). The paintings have darkened a little in the last three years; some of that will go away with a little sunlight, but I think it makes them a little handsomer. In any case, I don’t think they’re ever going back on the portfolio, but they are on flickr, now.

Unrelatedly, I downloaded Fergie’s solo album. Mostly so I could listen to “Big Girls Don’t Cry” over and over again without having to hit the “watch again” button on YouTube. And somewhere in the chorus there’s some little synth fall that sounds, for the life of me, like my cellphone ringtone. It’s driving me bonkers. Not bonkers enough to turn the song off, though.

Encaustic: 001. Steven: ???

Hmm. That’s… not exactly what I was expecting, actually.

I’m… a little bit enchanted, a little bit horrified. Yeah, kind of both. I think I may like it, but it’s going to take some getting used to. I wasn’t quite ready for something so… unclean-looking? I may try another where I just mix the volcanic ash with hide glue instead of beeswax–a distemper in place of the encaustic–I think that would look more like what I had in mind (more ashy, less… fleshy), but I don’t know. The encaustic mixture is really bodily and scary and kind of gross, and I’m starting to think maybe that’s a good thing? or could be? I’m going to have to sit with this one for awhile.

Encaustic is… kind of a trip to work with. I think the recipe I had (which, admittedly, I didn’t follow precisely, since I was working in really small batches, not knowing how much of it I would actually need) could have used more stand oil and varnish to keep it pliable for longer. I’m also sure it’s much easier to manage if you work on a flat surface and… work with pigments that actually suspend, rather than sinking to the bottom. But it was fun. Bizarre, to be certain, but fun.

Oh, and for the record, if you’re painting in encaustic on a 3D surface and you don’t have a heat gun and you want to burn in, you probably don’t want to just stick it in the oven at 250 degrees and walk away. Not so much. I couldn’t help but laugh when I opened the door and found that 3/4 of the wax had just run off onto the baking sheet. I don’t know what I was expecting it to do, mind you, but it wasn’t that.

I’ve been up since 5am. I’m covered head to toe to lungs in powdered animal glue and marble dust (apparently lipophilic, as it managed to bond somehow with any oil in my hair and skin, turning my head the consistency of steel wool and my hands and arms the consistency of latex examining gloves. Sexy, I know). Also! I can’t stop listening to Fergie. And everywhere I look, people seem to be using the damn cardboard banner letters (one, two) that I was so sure were my clever idea (Remind me to tell you about the time my friend Meghan spent an entire semester unwittingly recreating the entire ouvre of Eva Hesse–boy, was she in for a crisis when someone handed her that monograph).

I am some kind of cranky. Best believe.

cheats and swindlers

So, despite not having the money for these things, I went out and bought them anyway. I do hate buying art supplies here in Tampa, as I’m invariably swindled, at some point in the operation. That stupid little bottle of damar? $6.50. That beeswax? Fourteen bucks. It’s criminal. And what’s more, that beeswax included the most unsettling product warning that I’ve come across in years: (not as disturbing as the running should that warned that the manufacturer would not be liable for any injury or death that occurred while using the product) “Yaley’s natural beeswax is so pure, it may contain honey bees and/or parts of honeybees.”

Begging your pardon, M./Mme. Yaley,  but I would, and I feel I’m justified in this matter, consider parts of insects to be an impurity, as what I purchased (or thought I was purchasing) was 100% natural beeswax, not 100% natural wax and bees. The copper plates were a lucky stroke, though. I’ve had a small piece in mind for some time now, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it until these came along. More on that later.

Oh, right. Because maybe committing to it in a semipublic form will actually encourage me to see it through, I think I’m going to take a crack and submit work to this particular call. I don’t think I’m really who they had in mind (not Canadian, not a woman), but maybe this painting would work for their purposes, at least. I’d rather submit one of the birds, but I’m worried that the link might seem too tenuous. I’d need to write an artist statement (something I haven’t done in years and have never done particularly well) and a bio (something I’ve never had to do, period), and I’d probably have to give cam’s address in Winnipeg so it looked like I was actually living in Canada at the time of the deadline. But it might be worth it. I don’t know.

Oh, and lastly, I’ve been pegged to design the August/September cover of this magazine. It’s nice; small print run (3500), but full color, and something legitimate to put on a CV (I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to start taking off the filler material I’ve included on there, to date). I have no idea what I want to do for it, mind you, but it’s still a nice thing. Anyway, I have, like, two months to come up with something, so I should be fine. No sense in fretting.

Snatch the cat back

So this is the cat after the initial gesso grosso layer. When I was working on the birds, I started with the usual thin gesso, and eventually had to go in with a more paste-like mixture to fill in some of the areas wherethe underlying crochet stitches were still visible. This time I thought I’d save myself some of the work and do an initial layer of gloopy gesso that I could sand and shape before applying the tougher, smoother layers on top.

All in all, the process of making the cat has been much more “sculptural” than the birds were. Even though I still made a stuffed animal to work from, the cat is a lot less stylized/anthropomorphized than any of the animals I’d made before. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about that. And, ideally, I should have crocheted it in gray yarn, since the finished work is going to be painted gray. I just didn’t have any gray cotton yarn. Oh, and I used an armature. There’s heavy aluminum wire in both the front and hind lets, and an armature wire “spine” that extends from the tail all the way to the tip of the snout. All of this feels like cheating, somehow. But such is life.

Here’s a shot of it after the gesso had dried and I’d gone at it for about an hour with my Dremel tool, sanding blocks, and an assortment of rasps and files. You can’t really see it in the picture, but I actually broke the tail; this is the first time I’ve broken any of the pieces, and that’s kind of an accomplishment, given how fragile they are and how roughly I have to handle them when sanding. I’m not sure if I’ll start the final gesso layers today or tomorrow. I’ll just see how I’m feeling. There’s no hurry, since I can scarcely afford the beeswax and damar resin I’ll need to make the paint.

Things I’ve learned:

1. Horseflies do not like the sound that a Dremel tool makes.
2. 20-foot-range wasp and hornet spray easily dispatches horseflies.