The internal struggle, the twin

Going to the museum to stimulate repressed memories.

I usually have a good idea of what artists are saying through their work. Most of the time it isn't a gut reading but more of an academic realization brought about by massive doses of art installing, art history, art magazine reading and art show going. I can only count a handful of times that I had an aesthetic experience that wasn't somehow already burned in memory before I saw the work. I have an encyclopedia of images, artist statements and curatorial poetry that fills in the gaps between the work and the back of my head.

From the standpoint of knowing before going wouldn't it be cool to recall a memory that wasn't informed by the day job or amateur pleasures. When I was young and my parents dragged me around to museums I remember thinking, "why are these things important and why do my parents have an interest in them". These "things" ranged from artifacts of natural history, fine art and applied art. For the most part, a child has an instinctual or emotional experience in museums and sometimes his or her parents have a more puzzling experience because, perhaps it's a learned response they require.

Studied assessments are useful for cultural purposes and academia is fueled by them but what about the information that isn't readily codified or that slips through the labels or has been labeled but still has an alien relation to it's tag. I'm talking about the, "yes I know what this is but it's telling me something else and it makes me feel human" - feeling. I am talking about music or the musicality of art, the one - two punch of being conceptually sound and yet sublimating.

Rosalind Krauss describes Andy Warhol's rorshach paintings as a “parodic vision” in response to color field paintings which had attempted “to move painting into the disembodied realm of pure opticality”. In color field paintings, any interpretation relied solely on the response of the individual observer, saying more about the observer than the work itself. Krauss continues, “Warhol pulled the plug on these sublime aspirations by reminding us that there’s no form so innocently abstract that it can’t be turned back into literary content”. I had the chance to see several very large Warhol rorshach paintings at the Seattle Museum of Art. At first there was this feeling of being told a joke or parody but because of the scale and craft of the work I had to stay awhile and inspect the beautifully made and torrential surfaces. The paint or ink that made up the ink blot was thick, textured and black. Some of the black had oxidized and formed that rainbow slick you see in parking lots after a rain. The paintings were quite brooding and hilarious at the same time.

Sigmar Polke did some interesting landscapes for Parkett no.13 1987. Here he used several tactics for exploring the double image. He strays in two examples by utilizing symmetry found in the image itself but then thereby making reference back to the mirror image. Polke should be closely watched because as an artist he's very much like Warhol. They are both alchemists of pictoral space that both come off as aloof because of their seemingly effortless approach to a complex interplay between the viewer, their intentions and the work.

confiding pandemonium system

Another Paul Hiatt comp. and my routine of late has been working in the studio and listening to this remarkable collection of - hardly know what to call it. I think this one was the last he gave me before leaving for Seattle. It's aptly titled - Free Range Human, Last Chance. Somewhere between a girl and a torrential down-spiral Paul's on the loose with mind altering audio abutment, layers and texture. On this one he dabbles in his previous incarnation as a social worker for the insane. 

This comp has 7 pieces. Two of them are far too long to upload but I'll share the rest. These have no titles that I know of:

#1

#2

#3

#6

#7

Recently a brief email correspondence told of a major hard-drive malfunction and a couple projects may have been lost. I hope this is not the case and there's more Hiatt coming my way.

What go's into a song about hate

There's many ways to start a song. Just like a story, there's personal experience and allegory. Like poetry - there's words, meter, timing, dynamics and delivery; not to mention the choice of key and musical style. 

I've been working on hate. Peering into myself and the surroundings. It's easy really, there's plenty of it and I'll admit that I'm prone to the dark side more than the light. It's also easy for me to see it in other people. That said, I looked into fratricide for inspiration and came up with some interesting comparisons. John Berryman drew from Shakespeare to create his 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Shakespeare's Hamlet is Berryman's Henry. An argument go's like this: Hamlet kills his uncle Claudius because Claudius supposedly killed Hamlet Sr. to become king thus Hamlet's stepfather. Hamlet doesn't like the idea of his uncle (his fathers killer) becoming king much less sleeping in the same bed with his mother Gertrude. It's a familial killing and it's not a clear case because it's Shakespeare. Berryman brings it a notch further with the use of modern psychology. Berryman's Henry contains a double self. One self succumbs to the other through self hatred brought on by the suicide of his father and we're left feeling the loss of the weaker self. As one character triumphs over the other everything is lost. Shakespeare tells the story through multiple characters and Henry's fratricide is internal. Similarities arise in allegorical and modern times. Cain and Able for the god fearing, Romulus and Remus (Cassius/Brutus and Ceasar) for Rome and semite killing semite or Israeli killing Palestinian in todays world. Between the Jewish and Arab conflict we see another time honored tradition in familial killing - The Mark of Cain - meaning revenge is seven fold. If we are to follow this to possible outcomes we should wonder if Jews and Arabs in this part of the world might both loose to the another enemy, their Fortinbras.

My very small sketch of a song contemplates this by creating a musical equivalent with tension placed between  Amaj and Abmaj. The horns play a G#(7th) and E(5th) movement to complete and compete with the Amaj and Abmaj chord voicings. An F6 is a half-step up from the flattened Amaj. making a movement in halfsteps or as I like to think, stepbrothers. The dissonance created by the horns, guitar and vocal is like an entire family killing itself. Like Hamlet. You can listen to the slaughter here 

 

Havel, Texas artist paradigm

Joseph Havel is an artist from Houston, Texas but he's also an avid amateur botanist. I found that out one day walking through the Missouri Botanical Gardens. I can't remember latin names to save my life and even common names escape me but Joe just seemed to riffle off a name for every plant he pointed at. I wouldn't have known the difference, whether he was wrong or right; he spoke common and latin I felt, just so I would conceal my doubt and not ruin it for the other company.

A good memory can serve you well, especially when it comes to playing songs. I worked with Joe installing his solo exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park. The two of us completed the exhibition in three days. While working with him we talked about stuff. I usually keep to myself and simply manage installations and stay out of an artist's way - but Joe is from Houston.

Houston's where I bounced and confiscated drugs at a club called Energy, where I worked as a palate maker for a shipping company - being one of two english speakers. I lived in Galveston for a couple years playing pool with Russian and Chinese sailers at a prostitution bar called the Pink Lady, just down I-45 from Houston. You could say I know my way around those parts - the best places to find psilocybe coprophila under the moonlight, an isolated fishing beach or in my opinion, one of the best cities for art - Houston. My first proprioreceptive response happened while visiting the Jean - Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Menil. Something never forgotten and only twice replicated since.

Joseph Havel is Director of the Glassell School, a successful artist and just like all my favorite Texas artists, he writes songs and plucks the guitar. Joe and I talked about making songs, poets and how poetry and song writing relates to art, how a string of words can become sculpture, the nearness of words and objects, the use of space in music and sculpture and the stifling heat of a Houston summer.

After installing the show I gave him a CD of demos and said I'd like to hear his work. Two months later I received two CD's in the mail. Here's Galveston from the 3 song demo. I asked him what he thought of my work and he said he liked it because it was honest. You can't get any more honest than an acoustic guitar, an unfiltered close mic'd vocal and a heartfelt list of words strung together.

Welcome to the Hiatt Hotel

It's 1999 and you've just stepped out of the shower. There's a sound outside the door of your loft apartment on Washington Ave. in St. louis. You open the door and your dumb feet kick the crap out of a CD case and send it sliding under a church pew. A couple steps and you bend down to look...oh my, it's Hiatt Hotel.

Not really named Hiatt Hotel, just a play on Paul's name. Could be called - Animal Vegetable Girl or All The Things I like To Eat. There are six tracks on this self produced effort. Most come in at over 10 minutes in length and display multiple movements. Movements are defined by a change in tempo and orchestration. He pulls an instrument and or rhythmic element from the movement and sends it into another configuration - another movement. This is track 3, Hey Digital - the shortest and least offensive. Album cover is an original collage made by Paul. He gave this to me after I shared some 4-track songs with him the night before. Here's hoping he burned that tape. This work is complex, you can hear real instruments in here. It scared the heck out of me when I first heard it. I remember him saying he used a $200.00 computer to do this. That was about the time I started looking into digital recording and thought -schucks, if get a 200.00 computer I can do this? Nine years and 1,800.00 later.

Hiatt and not John

Paul Hiatt aka Free Range Human used to live in St. Louis. He now makes his home in Seattle, Washington. Paul started somewhat early and came out strong in the digital home recording arena with what I call electro acoustic acid collage. That's a quick label for an impressive musical human. Back in the day he used to live in a house on South Jefferson before the start of gentrification with a handful of other musicians. The band, Free Range Human (FRH) practiced and lived there. It was also a venue for anyone lucky enough to be there when the mood was right and B-flat was present. The band was one of those bands that could play anything if they wanted. You could have seen them on any given night on the Landing playing college covers, a british psychedelic gem and maybe an old blues tune infused with the Dead but they were artists and they didn't do that. FRH played a while but didn't seem to get the attention they wanted and toward the end there was a mixed roster of talent that made for unpredictable and exciting performances with players from Cenozoic and Potomac Accord dropping in.

Before Paul left for Seattle he worked on a project with me called 1917. While I compiled audio and video related to 1917 through an inner library loan system, the Smithsonian on-line archive and old 78's; I fed Paul the audio recordings to create audio collages that would then be dropped into a video timeline. I was teaching at Florissant Valley College and had access to a national academic library system that had a massive archive of VHS material. I was also taking a class in Avid for free in the evenings because of my faculty priviledges. Paul and I had farted around about working together and I quickly made haste to collaborate when I started 1917. Paul used Fruity Loops and Acid to generate sound beds that wrapped in and around found sound, bent notes and whole stanzas and worked with live recording. The image is from one of the evenings where we worked on some live recording did listening sessions. The inherent nature of the project was that of improvisation. Paul was really good at finding the sounds that had relative key structures while I supplied content and worked on the visual score. Superimposing the two media made for some amazing interplay. I kept some sound from the original video sources and mixed it with our audio collages. One of the highlights was juxtaposing one of Paul's supremely twisted theramin pieces to some WWI night time mortar fire and Viking Eggeling's Symphonie Diagonale. The theramin came from a victrola recording, very spooky indeed. If you haven't seen any of the early abstract work of Viking I highly suggest it. He worked with light and movement while others were trying to tell stories. Rothko and Newman came 40 or so years later.

I saw Paul and FRH off , watching his old white pickup west. While on the road he would start the seed of a project called 2000. I had taken the photo for it's cover at Weldon Springs conservation area. Paul has since released two more full length albums and has given me three unreleased full-length projects. I will post some of the work soon. Until then, get what you can from his myspace page, ask him to send you a copy - he's very generous and maybe I'll give him a little prodding.

towns and ties 2 - St. Louis

"The climate in today's market is the worst since 1929",  says NPR as I drive to work the day after new years eve 2008. I barely notice the road while pondering the repercussions for artists. I was one of four fortunate enough to receive a bump in income last year from an economic stimulus package awarded by Critical Mass, a non profit organization headed by Roseann Weiss, Sara Colby, Kim Humphries, Emily Blumenfeld and Meredith Mckinley. 

Four artists got a bump and I was able to get some cheap microphones on Craig'sList .  I'm cool with that. There are other artists that deserve this and I have a bad relationship with the idea of deserving. You get what you get...that's how I roll. Sure you work hard, are sincere, serious, smashing your soul against rocks but who cares. I know you shouldn't look up to see who's listening. If you stop to look then you've stopped and have entered into nostalgia. That's usually a sad occasion filled with drinks and loathing unless it was the best blow-job you ever got. So deserving; whether it's a blow-job or cash - you never can tell and I wouldn't hedge my bets...you just make your work and forget the rewards

Greg Edmondson is an artist who's probably made a life of saying forget everything else. As an artist, I can't think of anyone else more "deserving" . For another blog I'll talk about Joseph Havel and how he scored a poem under my nose -  John Berryman's, "The Dream Songs 46". Until then, it's the end of this poem that concerns us:

"Man has undertaken the top job of all,

son fin. Good luck.

I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.

Followed other deaths. Among the last,

like the memory of a lovely fuck,

was: Do, ut des."

I'd say that like the life of men or women the artist selects the only life they know. And according to J. Berryman it isn't very fun unless there's some good sex. There are other ways of getting satisfaction and this is what I'm trying to get to - the other "lovely fuck".

I first met Edmondson while working at Laumeier Sculpture Park. I think it was 1998 or 99' when we had the task of rebuilding the walkways along Beverly Pepper's, Cromlech Glen.

We worked that summer hauling 80 lb. granite  steps and large chunks of flag stone. We were museum monkeys as they are often called...people with MFA's working like they've got no other choice. We wouldn't wait tables, flip burgers, wash dishes or do any of the other unskilled jobs waiting for newly graduated or semi graduated or highly successful and now treading water artists...even it killed us. Greg is the later.

While working with Greg, I found him knowledgable in such diverse subjects as the physiology of reptiles, Greek mythology and Shakespearean play, German language,  New York and European art scenes of the 1980's, landscaping and stone setting and whatever bullshit we talked about while making Beverly Pepper's dream come true. 

I ended up moving into a loft one floor above Greg in 2000. We ended up as drinking buddies but also helped each other out on projects. We've never exchanged money, only a helping hand. Greg is a true sculptor in that he knows material, space and the properties of both when combined. He's also the kind of guy that scares other smart people because of his uncanny ability to match wit quickly and in different languages. Greg has been making work non stop since the early 80's. How many St. Louis artists do you know that have done this despite the many drawbacks? I wont go into that because no one cares, just look at the work. Holly Berry and Elton John liked it enough to own it. One thing I would bet on - if I had a flat tire I could count on Greg to help me out.

- Picture is of Greg and Brett Underwood helping me out with a project.