Robert Goetz

Print Trade FA11'

2011-11-21T07:09:00.001-08:00

Finished my class assignment. For the final, I have my students run an edition to be traded between us. This semester was a class of 8 students so the edition is 9 prints, including me. I have done this for every printmaking class I have ever taught. The tradition go's back to 1995 when I taught grad printmaking at Wash U.

Flesh and ghost hands working together. A print from a record that had been painted on by Chris King. I visited the PoSco prop shop to reconnect with King and caught site of a group of paintings he's been working on with Amy Broadway. I was struck by the texture of the paintings and mentioned that I would be interested in seeing how one might run through the press. Not bad. I was wiping my intaglio plates vigorously and transfered that method to the record. There's no need to wipe as much off with these I guess. I used the same ink from the print trade edition - Orange Pink for G6 and Blue Black for Em#9sus4. The text painted by King's hand reads, "I'm A Ghost". Inspired by Muldoon's, Incantata and a poltergeist tap on the shoulder?

audio portioning for still images

2011-09-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

making a score determined by random traffic in a specific location. color and sound relationships determined by Scriabin, Korsakov and Sabaneyev and the color of the cars. note duration and appointment determined by cars relationship to common fixed points in photo. i'm using pseudo diegetic and non-diegetic audio recordings and trying to fashion a drone highlighted by melodic instrumentation. exhibition is Sept. 30th, 2011 at the Sheldon.

new work - St. Louis Artist's Guild

2011-07-04T06:15:00.000-07:00

waterless litho

waterless litho and relief

waterless litho

steel engraving and relief

This series started in 2011 and began as a print trade with my students at the end of the 2011 spring semester.
These were printed last week at the St. Louis Artists' Guild printshop.
They are not on view as of yet. I'm just putting some up on the blog and keeping some hidden.

Here's a shortened tale of my connection with the Guild. When SGC came to town I took my students around to see the various exhibitions in printmaking. One of these shows was held at the St. Louis Artists' Guild. I was particularly interested in the Printeresting exhibit because they offer a great resource for printmakers, I'm a fan to say the least and I have a slight connection with one of it's founders - Jason Urban. The story go's that I was surprised to see Gina Alvarez, Director of Exhibitions and Education at the guild. I have admired her work for some time and having both survived Washington University and the following years, it was a pleasure to see her still vitally active in the St. Louis art scene. Gina talked briefly about starting a printmaking residency and I wholeheartedly agreed to being the first printmaker in residence. Well, there's more to the story but really what needs to be added is that Gina is doing important work at the Guild and one thing I've noticed is that the exhibitions have gotten more "printeresting" and have stepped up in calibre. Amy Thompson and Eden Harris kick it up a notch this time around.

the new work...bits and pieces

2011-06-20T19:41:00.000-07:00

making use of Ready Made Abstraction or fashioning one myself then using it as a relief printing plate or as a stencil for
litho. the plates are copies of the pickguards from my 62' Strat reissue ((89' American)) and an 89 G&L SB-1 bass. i'm intrested in the potential to take an object and repeat it's form until it becomes an 'instrument' of it's own abstraction. reminds me of Chladni Patterns or Cymatics, something i worked on in the mid 90's. i had a room in my apartment that was tuned to Bb and i made a few paintings using the sound furnished by the space, and some amplified stringed instruments.
sorry, no images of that...only a memory.

what up daddy?

2011-06-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

checking in...with myself? good news is that i'm printing at the St. Louis Artist's Guild because Gina Alvarez has asked me to become an artist in residence.
i'm working on music and printmaking for this residency.

above image is from a current series that i'll be working through. right now it's relief and waterless litho but i'm trying some etching in the lab. this will be a productive summer in isolation and i'm looking forward to it. happy father's day btw!

here's a SONG

Guest appearance by woodcut, letterpress, relief print expert

2011-02-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

Since I was disturbed from a post not quite a year ago I've been teaching printmaking at East Central College. Printmaking was my major for two degrees in art and I have always held a super geeky interest in it even if my art has wandered through many forms. As for teaching, I have taught printmaking for close to a decade and it always amazes me when I meet people who create a niche existence in this particularly unforgiving and most surprisingly beautiful art form. Eric Woods is an artist who has created a livelihood making hand made prints for industry and art through his business,
The Firecracker Press.
I first met Eric through a multi media project called Poetry Scores. Since getting back to printmaking I felt compelled to ask him to do a lecture and demo for my students at East Central. Eric has always been willing to share his craft, art and business with the community since I've known him and he responded as I thought he would, even with his busy schedule. My angle is to invite artists from various backgrounds in printmaking that give purpose beyond the classroom and can share a unique knowledge in the form. Most importantly, the experts I select have found a methodology that is unique and successful. While success is part of my golden rule; it's the strange and beautiful result that is most interesting. In this session with Eric we learned about woodcuts, posters, books, digital imaging, type, running a print business and working on a late 18th century Chandler & Price relief press. I will have a follow up post about Tom Reed's visit soon. Special thanks to Eric Woods for making time for my students and creating a community in print. Look for The Firecracker Press during the Southern Graphics Council art conference this March 16-19, 2011.

mini round-up

2011-01-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

the end of the fall semester 2010 brought an opportunity to place my work in a faculty exhibition. i treated the show as an experiment in staging works that employ strategies in music/sound and art. some of the work is new and some was made within the last two years.

the foreground sculpture is a song fragment. i think of it as a silent song. it's made from 1" torch cut steel plate and weighs a lot for such a little thing...kind of like the song it comes from. in the background you can see a text based work that is derived from the same song but is made from a different set of words. it is a large format inkjet print made from a torch cut, intaglio print.

this work is called guitar circle. i like thinking of it as a guitar drawing with a nod to guitar player/singer songwriters in the title.

this piece is from a set 5 actions i did in 2009-10. this one is called guitar drop duet in a & d. when i was doing this work i had in mind the early work of Richard Serra, namely the little film loop where he tries to grab a piece of falling lead - Hand Catching Lead.

Printmaking and the "Grand Scale"

2011-01-21T12:03:00.000-08:00

A couple posts back I talked about chainsaws and good cheap vodka. I keep thinking about the title and how it grates on me, how quickly I decided I wasn't making art. Off The Art Clock apparently illustrates an amnesia of personal creative history.

Recently, I was sifting through some flat files to make way for new work when I came across a series of 4-color photo lithographs from grad school. The series contains images of the grind, working on a kitchen line. I put myself through two university degrees by slinging hash.

While making puffy tacos in a small Texmex kitchen I pondered the magic of the lithographic stone. During the summer of 94' I was fortunate enough to have a brief but immeasurable encounter with Ronald Binks . Binks had agreed to take me on as an independent study that summer, before I shipped to the midwest. Binks cut a large figure and he was relentless in his instruction on the "Grand Scale". I shook my head in agreement during our sessions, so that he would continue, and perhaps a few more pearls would drop. My head was spinning with contemporary art nomenclature, from the lectures of Francis Colpitt, and I was coming to grips with my own interests and how they fit into the art world puzzle. I was wrestling with the personal narrative, the here and now and trying to comply with the Binks/Colpitt accounts of Minimalism, Rome, Albers, German Neo-expressionism, Golub and Judd. I made a lot of work that summer but I was going down divergent paths, listening and reacting to everything. It didn't help that the girl friend situation was a hurling locomotive, over the cliff, car wreck, earth quake..., and I was numbing myself with lithotine and living off black bean tacos and the ink under my nails.

I came right off the press and into St. Louis finding a familiar spot, working at Ciscero's. I think the change in scenery, the quiet, almost lonely and religious air of the studio, coupled with the Ciscero's sphere, helped bring about a new relationship between the "Grand Scale" and a humble life in servitude. I began to understand the language of the WPA printmakers as it pertained to my situation. I was "grandly" poor - check one. I had a new found interest in Dox Thrash - check two, and I was working in tandem with my piers Tom Huck and Howard Paine - check three, four. Tom was and still is producing prints steeped in the topics and mannerisms of early Renaissance and modern printmakers. His language, fortified by the masters, embellishes on the colloquial. I was attending critiques and learning that Tom's work wasn't much appreciated at the time, for it's embrace of printmaking history and I feared the same torture from professors who held the key to becoming contemporary artists.

Howard went about it through digital means. I followed Howard's approach because it was a method I hadn't become familiar with and saw it as an avenue to make "correct" (forward thinking) art. Howard had developed a process of color separation in photo lithography, this was before it became common in the graphic arts. Howard was very generous in sharing his secret and I soon began putting together a language that combined life and art with the study of printmaking on the "Grand Scale".

Images are a selection from the WPA series 94'.

most songs

2011-01-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

Still thinking about songs and art. Terry Allen said to me over the phone that songs are the same as art. I take that for the truth and ponder the meaning and construction of songs in the same vein. When writing a song I'm channeling the content and living
the words but sometimes the thought gets away from me. Sometimes the song gets put away until I feel it again. I may answer
a question a thousand times and If the question persists then I usually feel that much closer and obligated to finishing the thought or at least and more times than not, riding a slippery thought to a viable conclusion. That's how songs are made, out of the living and sleeping of everyday life. Making a song takes an awareness of the self and a proclivity in putting that into words with a melody and hook. Like Terry said, art does the same thing and yet some questions still remain. Here's a new song for the occasion: confusion

my rifle, my pony and me

2010-11-22T18:26:00.000-08:00

just a nice evening hymn by Larry Bulawsky...
image and audio from forth coming project.

off the art clock

2010-11-19T19:45:00.000-08:00

Moonlighting as a wood chopper.
Kent Gray was part owner of the Famous Bar with is brother at one time. Before that he made himself into a chef. You might suspect we have a lot to talk about. While working on stacking logs or boulders we might share a recipe for food or beverage. Today we made a pile of wood and respectfully cut trees. Earlier we removed vines, moved boulders, built walls, made waterfalls and anything that's a little crazy or too dirty for white collar work. I'd recommend the Stihl MS391 for eating wood.
Kent and I came up with Ruskova for a good martini or an all purpose "on the rocks" drink with lemon or lime.

2010-10-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

Making sculpture out of song...not just sound I might add. What is a song you say? There's many opinions and I'll add mine to the mix - song: some words strung together with a good amount of conviction and honesty and maybe a little loosen-up juice along with some chord intervals and a beat. Sculpture at it's basic has a conveyed scale, weight and material or maybe lacks one or more of these. It may or may not take up space but it probably addresses the topic of space as it has volume, gravity, specific gravity (a dimensionless quantity) or a measured displacement. With this juxtapose I have looked into a forced commonality between sculpture and song. I remember Ron Laboray talking about my work and making up a great term on the spot for this propensity - alien relation. Given that these sculptural letters are made of 1" thick steel, there's a measured weight. The song on the other hand can only convey weight by achieving an emotional and physical connection through a righteous beat, a great guitar hook and for lack of a better term - poetic and heartfelt lyrical dysfunction. Here's the song.

Labor Day

2010-09-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

studio time

2010-07-31T20:04:00.000-07:00

strings hold damp vibration and hand struggles with anger and guilt... not good enough. heat, stupid hand. there's more important things but hand wants guitar.

http://www.box.net/shared/r6obaxggbb

tobin sprout

2010-07-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

a nice surprise happened when i googled tobin sprout. i've been waiting 7 anos for his return and i'm very psyched about the new album - the blue birds of happiness tried to land on my shoulder. from what i can tell he hasn't changed his approach to playing and song writing. some would say that tobin writes the way pop songs should be written but i'm saying this is my mantra for the summer. i'd like to think that his music forms perfect intimate gem-like circles around the reality of the day. it makes me want to crawl into my musical space and craft or rather bash perfect little diamonds too.

links via YouTube:
1 - pretty - the blue birds of happiness tried to land on my shoulder
2 - and the alma mater GUIDED BY VOICES - circa MAG EARWHIG

Father's Day

2010-06-20T17:55:00.001-07:00

Towns and Ties #3

2010-06-20T16:25:00.000-07:00

Brett Williams makes video, audio, performance, sculpture and installation and sometimes collaborates with me in Nosey Parker. I recently made it to his wonderfully air conditioned studio that he shares with his artist wife Jamie Kraher. Brett and I have a long history in collaboration that runs the gamet of new media. We've used guns and utopian architecture to express a uniquely American solidarity that was founded on the principles of Platonic ideals. Recently Brett has been active in high definition video and methods of displaying his thoughtfully crafted sequences so as to disrupt the preciousness of his art. When an artist uses video, more than likely audio has a significant presence. Brett creates soundscapes that mimic or join the flow of his quirky jump cut video creations. Jump cuts are like guitar riffs in early nineties indie rock found in the likes of Fugazi or Mission of Burma. Later we might hear this in bands such as Square Pusher or Climax Golden Twin. Brett's video's used to take the form of ridiculous self commercials. In these videos the artist might wear a beach towel cape while running through an empty gymnasium in front of seated on-lookers or he might be siting on the toilet nude while eating peanut butter. Later we see only his name paired with seemingly stupid moving graphics and an obnoxious soundtrack of home made instruments and electronic noize. Recently Brett has transitioned into combining video with discreet objects while maintaining the "lowfi" aesthetic in conjunction with very complicated new media processes. He likes to defy the glory of well made video and audio by translating it through shitty 2W speakers and old CRT screens but he's equally as interested in screening in well made video rooms with HiFi sound. It's the possibility of presence that interests this artist and I hope to continue in dialogue and possibly make some more free spirited shit with him.

Black James

2010-03-13T19:57:00.000-08:00

There was a band out of Portland, Maine called The Mother Fucking Shit. I picked up their vinyl at Vintage Vinyl sometime in 95'. They were indie, putting work out through holes in their pockets. I'll never forget putting the record on for Mike DeLeon, his expression much the same as mine on first listen. An appreciation for a band that can fulfill the namesake and here's a St. Louis by way of Tennessee version - Black James.

You can check Black James out at the Sci Fi Lounge on March.19th.

Another take on Smokin' in the Cockpit + video snippet

2010-01-23T13:48:00.000-08:00

Sometimes there are fortunate outcomes to knowing creative people. Sometimes these people are generous in themselves and sometimes they bring others who also have gifts to share. Virginia Lee Hunter, a friend of Larry Bulawsky, came to my opening with her camera. This was a very nice surprise. Not only did Larry bring his talent as a performer - front man and guitar player, he also brought Virginia, a highly accomplished film maker, photographer, lecturer and there's likely more.

Here's the link to Virginia's take on Smoke in the Cockpit: 1

Here's a link to Virginia's art/business site: 2

Here's a video short of the performance:
Video was shot by Tim Meehan and to see the entire video please visit the Regional Arts Commission gallery

The night Tony Renner attacked my guitar

2010-01-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

There's a slew of things that happened the night of 1/15/10...most of which I was oblivious to. I was stuck in my own call and response world, catching glimpses of performance from my collaborators that I just had to shake my head at, in a good way...like a double take, you know the kind where you're a little shocked and you can't quite find the proper response. That's the way I felt anyway. I was stuck in an unrehearsed performance.

All my collaborators are great showmen and they also happen to possess a skill in handling the guitar. I've seen them on many nights, many bars with many drinks and it has been my perception that they have magical abilities.

It was good to see other people with this magical ability in the audience and they affirmed my thoughts that Smoke in the Cockpit worked...the idea was sound (pun intended).

Some of my favorite quotes of the evening:

Paul Ha - “It looks like the Grand Ole Opry”.

Paul was responding to the pre-performance equipment arrangement as in Susan Schultz’s picture of guitars lying against amplifiers. Though I’ve never been to the Opry I think the guitar is fundamental if not iconic to the Opry much like it is in my work.

Sara Tolch - “Sure...I’ll go see Robert’s new band...”.

Sara has been a friend for a number of years once she entered my life through her marraige with Andy Tolch. My wife Susan relayed this little gem of a quote after our performance and it could speak to the look on Sara’s face when she realised that
maybe this band wasn’t what she’s accustomed to. I think the story is that Sara wasn’t planning on going out but Andy mentioned my performance and she rallied to give her support. Sara, I hope you still enjoyed the band.

Tom Buescher - “Robert, you’re going to believe this....I forgot my guitar”.

This quote came by phone moments before taking the stage. Tom was en route retrieving his instrument. The pre-performance jitters or just a head-full of thoughts. Whatever the cause of Tom’s forgetfullness the performance wasn’t comprimised. I just mentioned the incident to the audience before we started...tossing it into the closet of rock n roll stories. I told Tom to take his time, be safe and jump on in when he gets back.

Mike Burgett - “It’s like sex when you’re old”

More or less. Like You’re the man and the guitar is the woman and you’re not going to get much out of this pairing unless you take your time. Mike was ellaborating on the musical score I provided in english. The goal was to make it last as long as possible but to also be aware of the other performers. To react as a group and as a couple trying to have quality time. There was some partner sharing but I guess in an unrehearsed frenzy there’s bound to be some of that.

I enjoyed the performance but I also took in a lot of information regarding guitar equipment, recording tips, the secrets of guitar players and audio engineers. I am also overwhelmed by the support from my collaborators and the art community. I will have a video of the performance installed at RAC soon and must thank Tim Meehan for handling the camera work. Please come by and see the video and leftovers of the performance, my sculpture and the work of the other artists involved in the exhibition.

Let’s do it again!

Susan Schultz took these photos:

SMOKE IN THE COCKPIT - rehearsal

2010-01-13T21:39:00.000-08:00

I'm posting these shots because I may never get around to it later. The whole crew will perform Jan. 15, 2010 - 7pm at the Regional Arts Commission. Tonight -Mike Burgett, Tom Buescher, Sherman S. Sherman and myself ran through a sound check for the performance on Friday. The whole crew will be Larry Bulawsky, Tom Buescher, Mike Burgett, Robert Goetz, Jason Hutto, Tony Renner and Sherman S. Sherman. Collectively we're known as Smoke In The Cockpit. More on that later.

it's getting spooooky around here...

2009-10-31T11:53:00.000-07:00

No art today, just normal human stuff. It's Norah's first Halloween and we've gotten into the spirit. We wish you a fun, safe and
spooooky Halloween!

collaboration

2009-10-23T05:03:00.000-07:00

(painting credited to hieronymous bosch)

SdB Yeah. He got a job at Bell Labs doing helicopter design as a way of pursuing his interest in the so-called Psychopter, which he was much more enthusiastic about than the helicopter.

DH What is the Psychopter?

SdB It’s Young’s idea of a vehicle that would transport the self—the human self—into another dimension. He really believed in this.

DH So this is outside of neuroscience or psychopharmacology. Are you talking about nuts-and-bolts engineering in the service of…altered consciousness?

SdB Exactly. He’s in pursuit of something fantastic, but positioned within the world of utter practicality.

DH Well, as painters, we have permission to take questionable theories seriously.

SdB To what degree do you have to be right, as an artist? There is the notion that you should have some idea of what you’re talking about, but it’s never going to replace how interesting a work is.

DH The work needs to reflect the strength of our convictions. Our motivation thrives if we believe that our efforts matter.

SdB I have this belief that the work will yield awareness or trigger a connection to the images as if they’re encoded in the paintings as bodies of information. It also becomes a way of escaping the issues around painting: nothing interests me less than the questions of abstraction, or the possibilities of whether painting can compete with other mediums. That seems to be really behind us.

DH This gets to the core question: What is painting good for?

*(full bomb magazine article can be found here: http://www.bombsite.com/issues/103/articles/3096)

I find this article interesting for the dialogue these two artists are engaged but I also find it taps into an idea that's been mull'n about my kehnoggin for some time. In April I took part in a project that challenged the notion of collaboration and more specifically artist collaboration and artist/curator roles. Because I'm a professional artist I take my role as artist into consideration, not necessarily seriously but always considerably. With professional collaborations there should be a basic understanding of ownership of intellectual property as well a delineation drawn between the art concept and the curatorial concept. One should also think about a contractual agreement if relationships bear a certain amount of hostility towards these lines. Lets just say that I will always be wary from now on. As an artist I think it abhorrent for a curator to shit all over my idea and work. The bold italic dialogue above points to the main issue in my mind - that is, what is the function of the art as opposed to the curatorial umbrella. I say opposed because sometimes there is a great but silent battle taking place between the two. I do have more to say about this in time. In the end I'll add that when conducting projects that involve people of considerable skill, good intention and quality there must be an effort to give credit where credit is due. When collaborating ask yourself, did I do the whole thing by myself with no help and do I deserve complete credit for all this brilliant work? In the end I ask all you self absorbed users to always check your ego at the door when asking for help' (me included).

On another note: The Bomb Magazine article is worth a read. While hardly touching on my issue the conversation is really inspiring. My thought is that it manages to be mindful of artistic practice and sincere. Arthur M Young is also worth checking into.

Got a new toy

2009-10-04T18:27:00.000-07:00

TOY

I've been working on ideas in the studio and I've been procrastinating my blog update for these fabulous ideas.
Hah, suffer through another original acoustic death song.

Future Plans

(image comes from an unknown web source not my family photo album)

Justaposition

2009-09-11T21:34:00.000-07:00

Heather Corley's foot squashes my tender dropped amusement.

belief

melt

2009-09-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

recording more sketches, sketchy songs...

recent notable recordings

2009-08-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of singing in a gang vocal session for a new album by Sherman S. Sherman. This is the same Sherman S. Sherman that offered up his property to do an audio/video piece for an upcoming - Friday, August 28th - opening at the Hunt Gallery at Webster University. The show is entitled The Unobserved World. Please come. It'll be fun? There's cold beer I've heard.

Jason Hutto (Phonocaptors and Walkie Talkie USA, also happens to be the guitar tech for Son Volt) is engineering the gang of Dirty Peckers (nickname for musicians who work and play in Sherman S. Sherman's Peck of Dirt project). Some pics of the beautiful and talented people who fill St. louis bars and basements with amazing sound taking part in the gang vocal.

I'm not sure when this album will drop but the song we sung on was one of the best Southside dirges I've ever heard...maybe that's the STAG talkin.

Light In The Darkness I Walk

2009-08-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Song sketch

Until The Wind Blows You Out

Two ol' songs

2009-08-01T23:27:00.000-07:00

that were recorded by Roy Kasten and played by Ann Tkach, Dallas Woodson and I. Written by me for Acoustic Death Music.
One night in apt. # 402 at 1629 Washington Ave., St. Louis, MO 63103. Winter of 2007

Summer
Waiting for the band

2009-07-26T17:50:00.000-07:00

Another collaborative effort sent three wild and crazy guys out to Rancho Sherman S. Sherman. Sherm is kind enough to let me
abuse his property and sometimes his friendship when I've concocted dubious plans in the guise of art. This time Daniel McGrath proposed the audio/video project that set the course for action.

I come at it through the ideas of John Cage, namely related to his "small sounds" lexicon. It's not that the sounds of this project were microscopic but that Cage made it possible for the most "insignificant" of sounds (namely silence) to be placed amongst the most rigid and time tested structures of western audio composition. By making 'all sound' a viable and thus potent carrier of meaning, Cage brings everything we hear and think we hear to the forefront of conceptual materials. So the question that interests me is: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" The question is then about perception and Cage was perhaps the first artist to point out the nature of perception as it is linked to memory.

For this project we set out to make sure that our memory serves us correct...that a tree does indeed make a sound.

Now in the words of Daniel McGrath:

Basically it's about teh philosophical absence of sound if it is not pecieved. It's connected (in this context) to the idea that if there's an opening at a gallery and no one goes to see it, does it exist a a show? What then is an exhibition?

There was a sex pistols concert in Manchester that 30 people saw, most of them went on to form new bands. Was that a tree falling? I think Da Vinci said something like this: "Music annihilates itself as soon as it comes into existence." It's the representation of the invisible.

song sketch

2009-07-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was testing out some gear for a project this weekend and I worked out some words and chords. It's been several weeks of not playing much so I was feeling a little rusty. The picture reflects some of the lyrical ideas in the song. The fat cat nor the picture of the cat is mine. I found it while I was looking for pictures of the morbidly obese.

The song combines several personal instances that needed an outlet. I think my time in jury duty slipped some idealistic phrases into the mix where a few curse words would have been used. It's just as simple as you can get. I repeat the entire song in the second verse and chorus but I throw in a G to disrupt the progression at the end. It looks like my gear works..I'm ready for the weekend.

DIN OF THE DEN

laziness of the day, of the week and possibly the year.

2009-07-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

One thing I'm reminded of when viewing this video is the laurels some rest on. Note to self: there is always going to be someone more capable and you are not irreplaceable. With this in mind, go forth with well intentions.

what it is what it is what it is what it is what it

2009-06-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

Relational strategies in artistic practice/ritual. Warlock Homage. When you place a certain significance on materials. I believe Joseph Beuys coined it "contextual material". You can see it in his felt and fat works. Another fascinating thing about Beuys is taken from the Wikipedia page I've linked:

"Also in 1958, Beuys begins a cycle of drawings related to Joyce’s Ulysses. Completed in ca.1961, the six exercise books of drawings would constitute, Beuys declared, an extension of Joyce’s seminal novel."

Rationing Doom

2009-06-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

Held securely in a south city fortress; a muse of death, toppled power, and redemption from the abusers of power slowly unburdens itself from an artist. The work seems to cut a wide arc through ancient and contemporary history all the while and unflinchingly exposing the most earnest of man's endeavor.

In this snippet Coby Ellison see's the mastery of men as a godless enterprise as his characters acquiesce to their fictional and consorting reaper. The characters in power play it a touch under audacious as they know what fantasy can become.

I first met Coby at SnowFlake where we were concurrently showing in two separate displays. His was an installation in the Drive By space depicting a diorama of war between ant armies. Mine was a drawing and audio score of a piece called Hate Project - Car Bomb. At the end of the evening we were sharing our interests in music. It turns out that Coby has also been involved in music with stints in punk rock bands and as a solo artist better known as Debbie.

A welcome sign for seasonal change

2009-05-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

Anyone know this little feller? It comes every spring through a crack in the concrete about the time my piennies start to bud, which is early spring. The flowers open and close throughout the day...notice the flower clusters. The honey bees, butterflies and hummingbirds frequent this plant thoroughly which makes for a busy little nectar intersection. I think my fig tree might benefit from the attention this plant gets. Yes, I did say fig tree. Anyone know about the rare Missouri fig tree?

I hate it when good people die

2009-05-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

One thing that's been bothering me is the passing of Jay Bennett. Here's a link to a live version of a beautiful album called The Palace at 4am. It would have been a dream of mine to record at Pieholden, Jay's studio. I would have quit all my other fantasies for the duration to do so.

If there's a heaven I hope Jay is there.

Links to some other work he had done:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAx4CPx3J7M&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE3ZON0DXY8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_BYgg4oUmE&feature=related

and Titanic Love Affair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqB-lvuv12E

Breathless

2009-04-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

A Nick Cave cover because I'm drunk with love.

Breathless

Part 2 of Guitar Drop Duet

2009-03-29T20:11:00.001-07:00

Guitar Actions

2009-03-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

Guitar Drop Duet in A & C

2009-03-03T20:18:00.000-08:00

Kind of like lovers after a rough go of it. The piece is 17 minutes long and consists of me dropping these guitars from a ladder onto each other or the ground and sort of roughing

them up a little. Those are potato stains if you're wondering.

prepared piano piece paired with electric guitar and potato

2009-03-03T19:55:00.000-08:00

A sketch for a larger piece I have in mind for another location. While I was at St. Charles Community College documenting and performing "Guitar Actions" I noticed a piano stuffed in the corner. I've always wanted to do a prepared piano piece paired with electric guitar and potato. In this case the potatoes serve to block the hammer dampers from stopping the B string sections. The guitars were ostrich tuned to B. Ostrich tuning means that you tune each string to the same note. I recorded the project but have yet to fumble with it in FCP and Logic.

guitar actions

2009-02-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

So i've been thinking about music and art lately. More specifically how they relate or could relate, how best to capture them simultaneously and how to employ their strengths. These

are general questions but they make sense. First I put myself in the role of an artist and then as someone who enjoys playing songs and sometimes gets lost in the sounds while physically playing. Sometimes I need to distance myself from the tactile quality of music...to challenge where it comes from and place the intellect into the hands of a monkey.

I wish I could do this to a really nice Strat!

Incidently some of these ramblin's will be presented at St. Charles Community College for the SCC Multimedia Invitational on march 11 from 7 - 9p.m. Check out the other artists in the show:

Anne J. Lindberg

Rosenthal sent for paint restoration

2009-02-18T20:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning I scheduled Tony Rosenthal's - House of the Minotaur, to go out for restoration. I've been using a company based out of St. Clair , MO to do all my blasting and painting projects that require 2-part paint systems.

While I do enjoy restoring work to it's original state and re-establishing the artist's intent, the main reason this process happens is because of the general public's inability to respectart. After a few years of battling my anger with the public's inappropriate interactions with the art collection I am in part responsible for, I've made a positive inroad and started a campaign to instill respect for the rich culture Laumeier has collected, it's strong direction regarding regional, national and international artists and it's unique Art Museum experience.

Tony's work is slated for return in March. We will re-install in a more prominent location to dissuade vandalism. Kim Humphries and I agree that it's original location was too remote and it enabled ignorance towards Platonic idealism. Art should always be respected, even if it's hard to understand or appreciate. It's the idea that humans are striving for something larger than pragmatism and that they're searching for answers or looking for questions.

Nick Lang helped with the de-install. I rented a Lull all-terrain 8,000 lb fork-lift. We useda cleet clamp and strap for picking. The two other men are named Jim and work for Commercial Blasting. These guys are good. They do classic car restoration from the ground upas well sculpture. Nicky, the intern, took the pictures. I'm driving the Lull.

Daniel and I install Heizer

2009-02-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

Today Daniel McGrath and I installed Michael Heizer's - Compression Line, 68'. It's the nature of museum work that it remains invisible to the majority of people who go to art openings. There is sometimes ridiculous events that unfold as museum monkeys scramble to make do with tools not meant for the situation. This is an elegant shot of an interesting day.

Michael Heizer would be proud.

Daniel is pictured in the photo. He teaches art history at Webster and is an artist himself. We talked about Robert Graves, down tempo metal, Fi Jae Lee and Allan McCollum and the systems employed when artists create cosmologies.

Fi Jae Lee is showing at the Cecille R. Hunt Gallery at Webster University, Friday, Feb . 20, 6 - 8pm. Click here for details.

The internal struggle, the twin

2009-01-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-12T19:23:00.000-08:00

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:

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

2009-01-10T11:26:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-07T19:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-04T18:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-04T05:43:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

"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.

Towns and Ties - 1

2008-12-28T08:47:00.000-08:00

It's the holidays and what better time than to reflect on the past and look into what makes you You. Corny I know but I thought I would like to post something that isn't necessarily wrought from the art hammer. See, I'm not from the midwest or should I say that although I was born in Belleville, IL and reside in St. Louis, MO I have a strong connection with the American Southwest. Mi mamá y papá vivos en San Antonio Tejas and I spent a long portion of my formative years basking in it's culture. Tucson and Albuquerque were stopping points for this military brat as well. Mi hermanos were born in these towns respectively. Recently I have become reacquainted with an old friend from SA. He was listed as the Interstellar Mexican in an email that I almost trashed if it were not for the abnormal reading of my junk mail.

The Interstellar Mexican as he called himself is actually Dario Flores III. I always liked that name. It implies an historic figure or a personal and storied past that must be important enough to continue telling.

Who the fuck is Dario Flores? We started art school together in 1991 at San Antonio Community College. I had forsaken a career in the biological sciences and Dario had escaped the small town of Luling, Texas. Luling is proportionate to Mascoutah, IL. to give you a midwest reference. I remember Dario explaining that his father worked for the railroad and I assume that this was the family legacy. His father being a Dario meant that my Dario would most likely follow along ....or not. I recall my first class as young art students. We had taken advertising art for our first semester and were sharing computers because computers were very new and I think we had 5 computer stations for 3 classes that had 10 to 15 students in each. You can imagine the bottle necking and cluster fucking that went on to get homework and class assignments done. While computers were new to the academic art scene, trading, bartering, pestering and bullying were not. Dario was this loud dude that was always pushing his way into the lab and offering slots of time to people who were already at a station. Once his time was up at one computer he would go to another and pester, barter, bully or steal for another round with ancient Apples. For one reason or another he never bothered me. It could have been that we had separate classes so he hadn't found an angle to pry. While in lab I would always bend an ear when Dario was hustling for another slot. It amused me so much that I thought to ask this guy about his reasons for creating a spectacle. I don't really remember what he said; something like, "she's hot and he's the smartest one in the class man...". Never the less his answer was pragmatic and lent a utilitarian aspect to an otherwise disorderly approach.

A semester later we started a band called Rain In The Face. Dario thought of the name, was the chief song writer and vocalist while I handled the melody and guitar. Our first gig was in my history class taught by a man of Cherokee descent who had a busy schedule with the United States Supreme Court petitioning for the right of Native Americans to freely engage in ceremony and religion with respect to altered-states and indigenous methods of achieving them. Rain In The Face happened for many years after, most notably playing in the King William district at a book house that held a weekly open mic poetry reading. Later I will post some of our boom box recordings done over the span of those many years.

As our friendship grew so did our art in divergent strains. San Antonio College was a fertile place for young artists, actually the entire city was and still is. We had the Blue Star, Pace, Southwest Craft Center, Fine Silver, Cactus Bra and San Antonio Art Museum just to start . Then there's the many independent run spaces and alternative venues. When you got tired of that you could head up I-35 to Austin and I-10 or I-90 to Houston - a day trip for either. Dario's work took off after entering into the fine art department and taking a class from Mel Casas. Mel was part of the Chicano movement in America. One can hear an opus to this period by listening to Ry Cooder's - Chávez Ravine. A second cousin to me - Eddie de la Vara, was a contemporary of the period along with Mel but you'll have to drive to Agua Prieta to see the 4' x 6' charcoal of a chicano Last Supper. Dario had started making large scale paintings referencing and riffing off Casas. I'd like to think that Brownies of the Southwest was a launching point for Dario. You can see a small image of this piece on Cheech Marin's Chicano website if you scroll through the paintings.

Dario and I went different directions after I got accepted to Washington University. I haven't seen or spoken to him in a while and it's good to hear from an old friend during the holidays. So what is he doing these days? Well, music and art are still happening but he's not so much the younger bully he used to be. You can follow the band he currently occupies here.

sketch for nora

2008-12-20T20:51:00.000-08:00

I gotta get this out of my chest with a sketch. The above drawing is a composite citing a Sigmar Polke appropriation of a medieval German print and a drawing of the guitar sculpture made by Picasso.

The sketch I want to emphasize is done in audio with guitar, two microphones, a vintage tube amp and distortion pedal.
I just bought a Shure Beta58A and SM57 off Craig'sList and was itching to try em' out. The amp is a 64' univox hooked up to a Boss OS-2 distortion pedal.
I bought the amp at an estate sale for $9 bucks and had it rewired and tubed by an electrical engineer pedal steel
player Scott Swartz. It's all class A with a beautiful built in tremelo!
I traded a crybaby wah for the pedal in 95'..best trade I ever made except for the Rudy Mays and Pete Rose baseball cards I got
for the Bucky Dent and Billy Martin cards. I don't care too much for baseball but as a kid I had a group of friends who
collected cards and caught snakes. I wanted to be on the better team so I tried to be a good collector. The distortion
pedal came from Mike Kiernan. I used to play with him in a two man
band called the Pussy Licks. We played the Venice Cafe, Ciscero's Basement and Gladstones but mostly we drank beer
and rocked my graduate printmaking studio at Wash U. till the wee morning hours. The band involved two guitars battling for attention. I have some tapes somewhere but that'll have to wait. Mike went on to play with Couch Bucket, an outfit comprised of Larry Bulowski and Sherman S. Sherman. Larry, Sherm and Maggie St. Germain then formed the Good Griefs which morphed into Sherm's Peck of Dirt after an unfortunate Good Griefs breakup (unfortunate to those of us in the audience who always saw a good show with Maggie on drums, Larry on guitar and Sherm on bass). Now moving on from St. Louis music mythology because I could branch out like a Kevin Bacon wet dream...and that ain't very appealing. What I came here to say: the sketch draws from Greek mythology. I encourage you to find the tale of Athena that pertains to her failed rape and the bastard child that comes of it. I'd like to do a video of the scene where Hermes and the other caretakers find the child intertwined with snakes. I've drawn a comparison of an abnormal megaly to the finding of the child. A personal discouragement and something I hate. Here's the sketch

Ahhh..hate

2008-12-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

Suite of photo's for a exhibition at Good Citizen. These images are
meant to be documentary stills. One image comes from passing the camera around to other members in the group.
The images are from the day we made Car Bomb.

Poetry score for Nailed Seriphim

2008-12-13T20:55:00.000-08:00

I participate in Poetry Scores, a non-profit which scores long poems in all creative media. I'm also a board member and unapologetically offer my creativity to the projects we produce. This particular sculpture was made in response to K. Curtis Lyle's poem Nailed Seriphim. The art must be titled from a line, word or phrase in the poem. The exhibition is hung according to where the line exists in the poem. This makes for an interesting curatorial take on the show. The poem determines where the work is hung. I suggest dropping in on the blog for Poetry Scores from time to time. There's lots of updates made by our creative director Chris King.

The audio for this piece comes from Gil Scott Heron's album "Pieces Of A Man", 1971. Track #4 - "Home Is Where The Hatred Is".
Tom Boyle helps on lead guitar as we do a cover version of the original. K. Curtis Lyle quotes the song title in his poem and
this gives me an opportunity to do an audio/visual score. When one asks the question "Who the fuck is Mortice Juwan Menifee?",
the scrutiny of a persons' past ensues and maybe, for most of us, there are things we'd be better off not revisiting. Privacy becomes public knowledge hence the television. Static informs the viewer that the revolution - seeking justice or the truth; will not be televised. Like the song says in the bridge before the second verse, "...and It might not be such a bad idea if I never, never went home again."

windmillprisonspider

2008-09-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

Sculpture made for Art In The Park, Jefferson City, Missouri.
The use of the ready made is becoming a theme in my current work.
Car bomb utilized a real car and this one investigates the
structure and vernacular of place.

New media also comes into play. For this piece I installed a video
projector and dvd player to project a spider making a web.
The projection is shot onto the ground and can only be seen at night.

There is a juxtaposition of similarities when you look at the structure
and movement of the windmill and spider constructing it's web.
There's even similarity between images and objects that corresponds
to a rural setting. I was interested in place as context and added
the word "prison' to drive the theme. I was also tempted to finally
title a work based on the work of Guided By Voices. It wasn't a literal
homage but something in likeness.

Music, I hope, finds a place in all my work. Thanks to Christian Marclay, John Cage, Dan Graham, Thurston Moore, Lauri Anderson, Terry Allen...etc.
Terry told me in a phone conversation that there is no difference in the making of music and art. With the obvious differences of material aside, it's about ideas. Different idea delivery systems.

HATE/video

2008-03-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Song: Written by myself and Greg Edmondson.

I recorded a conversation that took place between him and I

over some cocktails. The lyrics are pretty much verbatim.

Music: Robert Goetz

Players: Sherman S. Sherman - bass

Merv Shrock - piano, background vocal, engineer

Robert Goetz - guitars and vocals

Recorded and mixed: In Merv's basement on a two track tape recorder.

Mastered in hifi at Sherms

Video: Footage taken by Robert Goetz and Sherman S. Sherman during 3-1-08 trip to Sherm's land to pick up "Car Bomb" sculpture.

Camera: Sony Handycam, Super SteadyShot DCR-TRV17 NTSC

Edited by: Robert Goetz using Final Cut Pro 6

Please note: Neither Sherm or myself are affiliated with SatanHates.com.

3/3/08 - studio vermont

2008-03-05T06:34:00.001-08:00

Flip Flop Fly (Big Joe Turner)

2008-02-27T19:18:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

Yeah....Kansas City Blues. We cooked it. Kasten on the board with the Acoustic Death Ensemble.

I don't care....naw mean?

Loss

2008-02-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen.

Acoustic Death Music project:

Goetz - guitar, vocals

Woodson - bass

Tkach - drum

Kasten - engineer

A Bad Song I Am

2008-02-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen.

Acoustic Death Music project:

Goetz - guitar, vocals

Woodson - guitar

Tkach - drum

Sherm - bass

Kasten - engineer

Song is an adaptation from an original Modoc Indian song given to me by Chris King. I gave it a chorus and some chords.

another version of car bomb

2008-02-18T14:15:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

paranoid

2008-01-31T05:58:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

7. Paranoid (demo) 2:40
Robert Goetz - guitar, vocals

larry harry's eyeball

2008-01-31T05:57:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

6. (That’s How They Won WWI) Larry Harry’s Eye Ball 2:14
Excerpt from video shot in Dec. 2007

car bomb

2008-01-31T05:56:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

5. Car Bomb (demo) 3:37
Robert Goetz - guitars, vocals

she's awesome with a pistol

2008-01-31T05:54:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

4. She’s Awesome With A Pistol 1:40
Excerpt from video shot in Dec. 2007

HATE

2008-01-31T05:49:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

3. Hate 3:11
Merv Shrock - engineer, backing vocals, piano
Robert Goetz - guitars, vocals
Sherman S. Sherman - bass
Words by Greg Edmondson and Robert Goetz

357

2008-01-31T05:45:00.001-08:00

click on title to listen

2. 357 M***** F*****...Oh S***, What’s That?! :35
Excerpt from video shot in Dec. 2007

light it up...

2008-01-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

click on title to listen

1. Light It Up Suckers 1:53
Excerpt from video shot in Dec. 2007

HATE

2008-01-21T07:30:00.000-08:00

Hate Project: Car Bomb, 2007-2008

Special Thanks to Sherman S. Sherman

and these fine folks....

Ross and Kim
Larry Harry
Nick Lang
Brett Williams

Architectural Reprogramming

2006-02-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

Below is a project that I submitted to New Art In The Neighborhood. NAN takes place on Saturday from noon to 4pm at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. NAN is a class offering a muti disciplinary arts education to highschool aged students interested in developing skills, language and work which focuses on issues in contemporary art. This project allowed me to function as a mediator in overseeing the development of ideas and casting the group into the role of “Public Artist “. The outcome of this project is submitted to AIT for possible inclusion in the bus stop art project series. If images are selected to be installed the following stipend will go directly into a scholarship fund for students of New Art In The Neighborhood.

Project description: How do we extend the program of the space?

Program means different things depending on what context we place the term in. Here we are placing the term into public spaces and more precisely we will investigate program in the architectural social space known as the bus stop. Program in this case refers to the way we use the bus stop. The program determines how the space communicates the process we engage in. Architectural design can help give rise to a social code known as a program. We are programmed to conduct ourselves based on the design of the space. Program is site/place specific and we can see there is already certain social codes or ways to act in place for specific spaces. What happens when we change the program? What can we do to enhance, extend, restrict or recode the program of the bus stop?

Questions you can ask yourself to start the process:
How do I activate the space? What do I know about the space I'm trying to reprogram? Do I have a relationship or social code I already perform in this space? Are there other uses this space could serve? Is this the most boring project I've ever heard and why? Maybe it's the fact that bus stops are boring. We can start with the social code in place and make small adaptations like what AITis asking for or we can extend the idea by suggesting the rewriting of the program....some options might be:

- interactive components
- displays
- text
- color
- the way we interact with
others in the space
- sound/performance
- video/performance
- changes in architectural design/materials
- changes in the way we perceive the
inside/outside environment
- inclusion of site history and regionality

Nosey Parker on the WEB

2006-01-29T08:34:00.000-08:00

Brett and I have started a site to collect text, commentary and updates revolving around our Temporary Autonomous Zones project. It could be construed as a new library of sorts. Please feel free to visit and add to our collection.

Robert

POST MODERNISM IS DEAD!

2006-01-11T15:24:00.000-08:00

Just a short introduction to a wonderful idea. I had asked my friend and fellow artist Greg Edmondson if it was cool to approach Minsoo Kang and Phil Robinson (curators of the Post-Ironic Lull) regarding the installation of some of my work. Greg shrugged his shoulders in an approving gesture and I was off to go nuts with very little time....I love trying to make work for a show that has a considerable roster of talent cuppled with an immence concept and not having a clue what to do 3 weeks before the opening...it's literally nutty time. Minsoo's essay below sparked the exhibit.

© Copyright 2005 Minsoo Kang (kangmi@umsl.edu)

THE DEATH OF THE POSTMODERN

AND

THE POST-IRONIC LULL

Minsoo Kang

The cultural moment that was identified as the postmodern is over.
A convincing case can be made that postmodernism was already at a moribund stage in the late 1980s and died a series of deaths in the first years of the following decade. If this is the case, the questions we are faced with are what has come in the wake of postmodernisms death?; what new ideas and conceptions of humanity and society have been introduced into the culture since the demise?; and, how are we to describe the cultural moment of our own time?
We are in a period of the post-ironic lull.

I felt compelled to meditate on contemporary culture while putting together the syllabus for an introductory course on Western intellectual history I am teaching at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. The class was designed to give my students a sweeping view of the most significant ideas and movements that shaped the Western mind from the time of the ancient Greeks, with a significant space at the end for the latest developments in the intellectual world. As I was considering reading materials for the last part of the course, however, I noticed that the works I was looking at, including Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality (1976; US publication 1978), Jean Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulations (1981; US pub.1983), Donna Haraways A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), and Judith Butlers Gender Trouble (1990), were all at least a decade and a half old. Moreover, I realized that in the last fifteen years there has not been a single work published that created the kind of impact on the general intellectual scene as did Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology (1967; US 1974), Thomas Kuhns The Structures of Scientific Revolutions (1970), Clifford Geertzs The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Hayden Whites Metahistory (1973), Edward Saids Orientalism (1974), and Foucaults Discipline and Punish (1975; US 1977). When I consulted my colleagues in the history, English, and anthropology departments, they confirmed that with the exception of some original works in specific subfields (e.g. postcolonialism, identity politics, gender studies) and compelling but hardly revolutionary works by such contemporary thinkers as Slajov éiûek and Bernard-Henri LÈvy, the intellectual world has been in the doldrums for the last decade or so. This was reflected in the rather torpid mood of recent academic conferences, in contrast to the meetings of the 1980s and early 1990s when poststructuralists and their opponents (both classical positivists and traditional leftists) clashed in often spectacular duels of ideas.
In my own experience as well, when I first began graduate school in European history at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988, I was informed early on that poststructuralism was already in decline in France (Foucault died in 1984) as the younger generation of French intellectuals were more interested in pursuing specific issues in the political arena rather than engaging in abstract criticism of systems of knowledge. Nevertheless, UCLA was one of the major institutions in the US where vigorous and sometimes bitter debates about critical theory and postmodernism continued into the 1990s. Then in 1994, I had to return to my native country of the Republic of Korea to fulfill my mandatory military service.
After a twenty-six-month stint in the army, at a base near the Demilitarized Zone, and taking some time after my discharge to come to terms with the experience by writing about it, I finally came back to UCLA in 2000 to finish my studies. Upon my return, I discovered that while many of the people involved in the debates of the early 1990s were still there, the issues were no longer so contentious. In what is a sure sign of an intellectual movements decline, many poststructuralist ideas and postmodern attitudes had been assimilated into the general academic discourse without altering its agenda in any fundamental way. So I often encountered scholars who would never describe themselves as a poststructuralist or even a theorist but who found some aspects of Lacans or Foucaults works useful enough to utilize them in a moderate fashion in their own writings.
As I finished my degree and began my career as a history professor, I began to think seriously about the intellectual lull in contemporary culture, an issue of special interest to me since my field is in intellectual history. At least since the sixteenth century in the West, the period in which the dominant intellectual movement was in decline was also the period in which the next leading movement was in ascendance, with a few decades of overlap when the two were in conflict. For instance, the founding works of the Scientific Revolution, Copernicuss On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), Keplers The Secrets of the Universe (1596), and Galileos The Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), made their initial impact in the intellectual world not in the wake of the old Aristotelian worldviews demise but while it was still very much in force, as evidenced by the churchs persecution of Galileo in the 1630s. It is only with Isaac Newtons Principia Mathematica (1687) that one can speak of the final triumph of the new paradigm.
There is always an element of the arbitrary in pointing to a moment as the end of a historical period or of a cultural movement, but the date that for me marks the death knell of postmodernism in the US is June 18, 1993, when the Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Last Action Hero premiered. A thoroughly postmodern work employing the standard devices of self-reference, ironic satire, and playing with multiple levels of reality, this action-movie-about-action-movies became, despite its enormous budget, state of the art special effects and a superstar and a director with proven track records of success, the most famous box office disaster for years. In fact, its status as a postmodern artifact is heightened by the very fact that its fame rests on its failure rather than its content (signifier rather than the signified). And in the US, theres no surer sign of an intellectual ideas final demise than its total appropriation by mass culture. The actress and comedienne Aisha Tyler subtitled her recently published book on her musings, Reckless Observations of a Postmodern Girl. This, despite the fact that already in 1989 David Foster Wallace, in his novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, presented the highly embarrassing situation of a woman who has the gall to actually call herself a postmodernist (No matter where you are, you Dont Do This. By convention its seen as pompous and dumb.).
So what are we make of this lull in the intellectual scene of the last decade and a half? Where is the new cultural paradigm that should have already been in ascendance in the late 1980s? Is it possible that the direst and the most hysterical warnings of traditional humanists-rationalists-positivists came true that postmodernism and poststructuralist ideas made such a thorough assault on all notions of objectivity, rationality and reality, exposing the hidden agendas and power structures behind every ideology, conceptual system, and linguistic structure, that they made it impossible for contemporary thinkers to posit any new system of knowledge? As the postmodern died, did it drag all of Western thought with it to the grave, leaving its minor caretakers only the task of mopping up the remnants of defunct orders?

A few weeks ago, I was discussing these questions with a colleague at the fine arts department who is also a professional artist, when I suddenly realized that the new paradigm and the cultural moment after postmodernism was not only right before my eyes but the very subject of our conversation. Martin Heidegger, in his 1929 essay What is Metaphysics, pointed out that science claims to study what is and what exists, and beyond that nothing, but then asks, What about this nothing? The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way dont we just concede it? In a similar way, I thought, After the demise of postmodernism, there is this lull in the intellectual scene. But what about this lull? Is this lull a pure negative state of affairs where nothing is happening? Or is the lull precisely the thing what is happening in the contemporary period?
This led me to postulate that we are in a cultural moment that could be called the post-ironic lull, and that this was the new paradigm that was in ascendance in the late 1980s and came truly to the fore in the second half of the 1990s. Scholars in forward-looking fields have been mulling over the lull and waiting for its end with the arrival of a new system or methodology of knowledge, not realizing that this mulling and waiting are what defines our age, our intellectual scene. So far, it has been an unproductive mulling and waiting since those activities or inactivities have not been recognized as the very modes of discourse in the post-ironic lull. Now that the moment has been identified and named, however, some strategies can be worked out to produce lullist thought and art.
The lull is post-ironic not in the sense that it rejects irony (one of the more obtuse questions that was asked in the wake 9/11 was whether the event marked the end of irony), but that it comes after postmodernism whose primary mode of discourse was irony. The lull employs irony, but with the full awareness that it was something handed down to it and so carries a whiff of the uncanny, like the clothes of an older sibling who met an untimely death. The lull also inherited the postmoderns critical and experimental spirit as well as its ingrained skepticism toward any totalizing ideology (contemporary thinkers, including éiûek and LÈvy, tend to avoid having their ideas solidify into rigid systems by opting to write in a concise, meditative format or by repeatedly changing positions on key issues). What differentiates them is that while the postmodernist attitude is predominantly ironic, critical, and experimental, the lullist attitude is suspenseful, tentative, and anticipatory - or, to be more accurate, ironic, critical and experimental in the larger context of the suspenseful, tentative, and anticipatory mood of the lull. Anxiety of influence notwithstanding, the post-ironic lull both continues and dissociates itself from the postmodern, in the same way that postructuralism came out of and rejected structuralism.
A key aspect of the post-ironic lull is that while the lullist is waiting for the lull to end, for the next system of knowledge or cultural movement to take us out of this liminal or interstitial period (there is a group of artists and writers who are associated with an Interstitial Art Foundation), she secretly dreads that very end, for the fear of what may come after, what may already be slouching toward Bethlehem. When the lull is over, we might be faced with some monstrosity of totalizing surety, perhaps a new-fangled version of retrograde nationalism or religious fundamentalism. So even as a lullist waits and tries to come to terms with the discomfort and uncertainty of waiting, she tries constantly to delay the lulls end. For those on the traditional left, this may mark the post-ironic lull as an essentially conservative moment, in the same way as contemporary Marxists scholars such as Frederic Jameson and Perry Anderson have characterized the postmodern as a late capitalist reaction, since it seeks to postpone revolution indefinitely. For the lullist, however, delaying is a defensive act against the myriad dehumanizing systems that have often been created by triumphant revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. This attitude is the result of the cultural response to the historical events of the last decades which saw the end of the Cold War usher in a period not of increased peace, prosperity, and liberty for the world as a whole, but of the global expansion of corporate imperialism and renewed ethnic and religious fanaticism.
In the lullist version of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are not so naÔve as to think that the arrival of Godot will end their loneliness and uncertainty. They know that Godot did come numerous times in the past, and in many of those occasions he created situations infinitely worse than the one they are in now, including those of war and of totalitarianism. So they learn to appreciate the period of waiting, make the best of it, revel in it, and finally pray that Godot will never come.
The productive as well as liberating aspects of the post-ironic lull begin with this recognition of the lull as a possible space of boundless creativity and experimentation, following the demise of a cultural movement that was replaced by the Heideggerian nothing. One can then begin to write the lullist history, the lullist political theory, the lullist philosophy, the lullist psychology, compose the lullist music, the lullist novel, the lullist play, the lullist poem and create the lullist painting, the lullist sculpture, the lullist architecture, the lullist film. Such works would see the contemporary moment as an in-between state, filled with anticipation and hope as well as suspense and dread, and celebrate the temporary suspension of rules in the moment by creating multiple sets of rules that sometime contradict one another.
One such rule would be that the language of lullism should be as comprehensible as possible, though with intimation of multiple layers of meanings. This would be in direct reaction to the obscure and overly technical language of postmodernism a necessary act for that movement since poststructuralist thinkers had to create an entire language for themselves in order to critically examine the nature of language itself. The post-ironic lull, however, would express itself as much as possible in everyday language, but under the condition that its statements should be open to many different readings and many dimensions of significance. For instance, in lieu of a work by Derrida, the lullist may utter the old Zen koan: When someone points at the moon, only a fool looks at the finger. This could suggest different attitudes toward and interpretation of deconstruction (e.g. is the fool truly a fool, or a kind of wise fool who sees something nobody noticed before?). The ultimate point would be the indefinite suspension of definitive meaning, or the moment definite meaning is finally imposed.

I imagine an allegory of the post-ironic lull from an early episode of the Trojan War. Ships from all over Greece gather at the port city of Aulis to launch the invasion of Troy. Unfortunately, their leader Agamemnon offends the goddess Artemis in some way and she causes the winds to die down, immobilizing the fleet. Agamemnon finds out that to make amends, he must sacrifice his favorite daughter Iphigenia. After some hesitation, he summons her to Aulis, under the false pretext of a marriage to the hero Achilles.
During that period of waiting, a frustrating lull for these brutal warriors, Diomedes, the prince of Argos, is met by Thersites who is identified by some as his cousin. In The Iliad Homer describes the latter as the ugliest man in the entire Greek army, who is beaten by Odysseus for suggesting that they forget about the stupid war and go home, while another source tells the story of how he was murdered by Achilles for ridiculing him on the battlefield. Despite his connection to Diomedes, some scholars consider this contentious figure to be a portrayal of a low-class foot soldier, the only such character in the Homeric epics.
After listening to the noble Diomedes complain about the lull and his impatience to set sail and make war on the Trojans, Thersites characteristically contradicts him.
Foolish son of Tydeus, you are bursting with frustration because you cannot wait to embark on this wholly idiotic war and claim your glory and booty in the foreign land. Dont you know that this moment, this lull we are in now, is the best time you can possibly hope for in this entire enterprise? If you had any sense, you would realize that what you will face in Troy cannot possibly live up to the fantasies of excitement and victory in your savage mind. From the moment you land on those shores, the reality of war, death, and barbaric cruelty will set in and shatter your naÔve expectations.
But here, as we wait for our chief thug to murder his innocent daughter so we can get on our way here you can tell yourself all kinds of fanciful stories of glories to come and destinies to be fulfilled. You think this lull to be a curse of the gods, I say it is a gift. An all too precious one that will taken away soon enough with the scream of a young girl destroyed.
I myself wish that this lull would never end, so I can dream away without hurting anyone. This is the best time of this story, and it will all be downhill from the moment the winds move again. Your eyes are firmly fixed on a ridiculous and impossible future, Prince of Argos, while mine are set on the present. This present so exquisite in its stillness, its suspense, its freedom.
It is at this time and on this place of Aulis that I will sing my song, dance my dance, and offer my prayer to the god of delay, if such a deity should exist. The past is a graveyard and the future a dark cave, so I will dally in the garden in between as long as possible and love the lull as I love life itself.

Early Model for TAZ

2006-01-08T13:09:00.000-08:00

The first image is a rendering that could reference an abstraction or generalization of the structure of a virus. I started with this idea because it called to mind a collaboration I had with my brother Dr. David Goetz, a research scientist in molecular biology at the University of California, San Francisco. His research at the time focused on the structure and magnetic charges of proteins occurring in the SARS virus. Here was something I thought was very exciting and very true in fields of study where structure is a primary concern. As a sculptor I had also come to realize that function follows form. The "function" in terms of art is wide open. First you have to determine what you are trying to accomplish; whether it be pragmatic or not. Generally: art, by it's own nature, slides between and shape shifts into other disciplines. In doing so the artist uses a pallette of ever increasing proportions.

The second image is a truncated icosahedron. It became a three dimensional study model for the construction of the TAZ. Here we see an experimentation in materials with text refering to the conceptual and actual nature of the materials and structure.

Nosey Parker's TAZ @ ERGA TOPICA 2- Opening night

2006-01-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

Erga Topica is an outdoor invitational curated by local sculptor, painter and educator Greg Edmondson. Erga Topica 2 featured Nosey Parker (Robert Goetz -Exhibitions Preparator, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO and Brett Williams - Interactive media installation specialist, Science Center, St. Louis, MO); Craig Pleasants - Program Director, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Jennifer Odem - Assistant Professor in sculpture, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN; Alison Ouellette-Kirby -Associate Professor in sculpture, St. Charles Community College, St. Peters, MO; and Eric Troffkin - Program Director, School of Art, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. Erga Topica is a Greek term that roughly translates into English as site specific. Thomas Jefferson School of St. Louis, an independent boarding and day school, is the site in which this exhibition takes place. Nosey Parker's work consisted of two Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ's for short) designed and built by myself and outfitted with wifi video and DVD recording gear supplied by Brett Williams. The TAZ's were placed 320 feet from each other to approximate the width of the Mississippi river at the Mary Meechum historical site. All photo's taken during the exhibition were by Jamie Kreher, a local artist and educator.

Catalog Text:

Dear Viewer,

Maybe we’ve turned aside the normal role of the artist and have asked the viewer to shift from the passive spectator and made him or her the subject. We cant speak for everyone but everyone can speak and thus there’s an unexpected and actual exchange between artist and viewer. It’s definitely like Nosey Parker is asking the audience to create the subject of our work. We’ve constructed the environment, given you a suggestion and now we think you should supply the content. You, yes you...and before you get the nervous tickles may we remind you that our necks are on the line.

Our history as Nosey Parker has been that of a collaboration. Informed by various media and open to an evolving set of methodologies, we have sought to bring about the unexpected. With the Temporary Autonomous Zones project our concern encompasses all impromptu and /or rehearsed performances. “Performances” are defined within the general and specific employment of the term ie., you can do whatever you want. We are cataloguing performances so we feel there is sufficient proctoring unless we find there are some exhibitionists among you. That, by the way, would be most unexpected.

With that said, we invite performances from the students and faculty of Thomas Jefferson as well as from the visitors to this show. For the future we are considering artists who are active in a specific performance genre. If you have an idea about a specific type of performance please let us know.

Thank you,

Nosey Parker - Robert Goetz

PS.

This iteration of the T.A.Z. is a departure from the original idea of a cold, calculated extension of passive/ active space. The original idea of a virtual bridge is still there we just took a temporary departure.

Poster from Performance by Brett Williams. Photo taken by Jamie Kreher

Brett Williams performing "The Shaman" as an interactive component to our Temporary Autonomous Zone installation.

Brett Williams (St. Louis artist and one half of Nosey Parker) - In TAZ A. transmitting to Carrie Waldman (New York painter) in TAZ B. Joyce Pensato - New York artist, is looking on.

Left to right: Susan Schultz - graphic designer and partner, Thordis Adalsteinsdottir - New York artist, two unknown viewers,
Greg Stone - New York artist, April Kirchner - Inturn at Laumeier Sculpture Park. People in TAZ: Sabine Russ - New York critic and curator, Jon McCafferty - New York artist and studio assistant to Elizabeth Murray, Maximillian Volk - Son of Gregory Volk and Sabine Russ (art critics and curators).

From left to right: April Kirchner - My intern at Laumeier Sculpture Park, Jon McCafferty - New York artist and studio assistant to Elizabeth Murray, Thordis Adalsteinsdottir - New York artist, Brett Williams - St. Louis artist and one half of Nosey Parker,
Joyce Pensato - New York artist and uninhibited photographer.

People in the TAZ: Maximillian Volk and Jon McCafferty

NEW FORM

2006-01-04T22:27:00.000-08:00

It's simple in design but the road there was full of wrong turns that compelled me to confusion. When I found this shape I had been disgusted by my assuming that everything was discovered and built upon by time and very capable brains. What I did eventually discover was that my assumption occurred through a respectful avoidance of challenging the world built up by celebrities. When I was about to give up for the night and finish that last beer I decided that the C-60 molecule couldn't hold itself up when scaled to human proportion and this left me with no other choice but to truncate the model Bucky Fuller found to be the most stable man made carbon chain. What facter coarsed through my brain like a free radical.... did they forget to finish their last beer thinking that all content had been rung from the athletic distortions and permutations of their sober, assured and well connected minds? They may have not even tried, what I managed to aquire, through derelict reason.... autonomy in the wreckage before I went to sleep.

This form is the launching point for more investigations of TAZ sites. I may work through the same model, adjusting for different variables caused by site specificity. I may do away with calculated structures and work with an intuitive interaction with material and space. I think it's an important first and that the arrangements between architecture and art are endless. Dan Graham has interesting insights into how video and performance combines with architecture. If there's artists out there that have ideas I'd like to encourage an open dialogue.

Models of the T.A.Z.

2006-01-02T08:04:00.000-08:00

Here we see several models depicting different structures and materials. The background model is the one I chose to develop for the T.A.Z.. It is made of 4 millimeter coroplast and is proportionately exact to the actual T.A.Z. The middleground shows an example of the C60 molecule version in cardboard. I like to think of this as the pimped out version. In the foreground is one of the first proposed ideas. I investigated structures being made at Burning Man and came up with this with the help of a link from the Burning Man website. I did produce a life sized prototype made of steel conduit but it posed problems in the area of long term stability and didn't give me suitable options for covering the form.

Buckminster Fullerene - C60 - Schematic

2006-01-02T07:19:00.000-08:00

To construct the T.A.Z. I went through several stages of working from drawings to models. These drawings are done on "post it notes" and reflect some of the many influences and forms I worked through. The drawing on the left (in top view), is of Buckminster Fullerene - C60, a theoretical molecular structure concieved by Bucky Fuller. He sought to create, with top scientists of his day, the worlds strongest molecule. We can see the use of carbon chains depicted by the hexagon. This would would have also been the worlds largest man made carbon chain molecule of it's time. Bucky never saw the concept through to a functioning compound but I was able to use his model to generate the T.A.Z..

The other two drawings, to the right and below, investigate an approach through the use of isosceles triangles. later I determined that there were too many vertices in this design to afford a functional or easily built and maintained structure.

TAZ in the snow functions as sculptural object without the interactive media installed

2005-12-26T08:31:00.000-08:00

TAZ at Thomas Jefferson School for Erga Topica 2, 2005

TAZ History, Part 1

2005-12-26T08:06:00.000-08:00

History of Nosey Parker's Temporary Autonomous Zone

Buckminster Fuller had this plan to cover ESTL in a giant dome. He probably looked at the city's history as an industrial suburb of St. Louis and in being familiar with this post war paradigm in major American towns he conceived the Old Man River Project as a way to cover or separate St. Louis’ shadowed conjoined twin from the reality that was setting in. The reality of most industrial suburbs is to be abandoned by a population devoted to inhabitation and taken over by industry, pollution, crime and degenerate business’ not benefiting a healthy community. Here is a place that is condemned by capitalism and a national post world war growth where the trash of utopian cities has collected.

The European townships and official settlements of East St. Louis started before the western neighbor. It was the French and Indians before who bridged the Mississippi and connected trade along it’s banks. The French and then Spanish shared and switched rule over both sides of the river and sought to dislodge the native people. Not until the Louisiana purchase did Europeans separate and place labels of wavering importance on the land east and west of the Mississippi. When Missouri petitioned to enter the Union of states in 1821 it did so along with Maine. Missouri became the 24th and revitalized the sentiment among Southerners that the negro must help the European unconditionally. In order to keep a balance in congress, that is equal representation of slave and free states, Missouri was admitted as a slave state with the exception of anything north of the Mississippi river(32nd parallel). This was known as the Missouri Compromise and was enacted in part to stop the spread of slavery. Since the Compromise we have had a partition between land east and west of the Mississippi. We have seen development and destruction along both sides of the river in accordance to the shift of power and intendment of each city.

When one currently looks across the river from St. Louis and specifically stands at the Mary Meechum Freedom Crossing site we can think of this place and everything within site as connected through a portal of history. We can see this place through the eyes and thoughts of slaves crossing the river to freedom, Buckminster Fuller and his analysis on the future of East St. Louis, Native Americans known as the Missouri, Cahokian, Illinois, Osage and Sioux, Pierre Laclede and August Chateau, founders of St. Louis, or as pre and post world war Europeans vying for business, land, shipping and resources. Everything about this place has been used in one form or another to benefit one man or another with varying degrees of success. Is there a history in this land that builds without depleting any of the marginalized or hasn’t used land for the profit of one and detriment of another.

My concerns with this project started long before I met Brett Williams. Through meeting with Brett I was able to realize some old aspects and set newly acquired interests into motion. Then there has been this positive outgrowth of collaborating with similar ideas. Our interests converged while talking one afternoon in 2004 at my favorite watering hole. I had mentioned an idea I had for a bridge that could connect the two cities of St. Louis and East St. Louis without the use of a structure that brings and takes resources out of one or the other. I was looking for a way to create an exchange without impeeding on the environment. A place that could be built and taken down quickly and bring people into dialogue. I wanted to connect the two cities with a positive non-evasive bridge that symbolized the historical struggles and sought to create a bond without concern for politics, business, race, class, but to allow this to bleed over into either side if those present wanted to discuss such matters. No one was to make off with any material wealth through this exchange...only the wealth of gaining information, a neighbor and possibly friendship. Brett had mentioned a writer named Hakim Bey and said that I should look him up, in particular the work known as Temporary Autonomous Zones. Brett said I had ideas that paralleled this work and that he was interested in lending a hand in developing my initial plans.

Brett and I began by taking trips to the Mary Meechum site and to the area across the river. We took photos, made sketches and talked about our idea with people we thought could help us realize our project. We made a proposal and models from our early designs and tried to set up meetings with those who could fund and make available the land we wanted for the installation. We wanted site specificity because the Mary Meechum site described a key moment in the history of the struggle between the two cities. We envisioned a utopian architecture housing video wifi on both sides of the Mississippi. Power would be provided by solar and battery configurations. The architectural material would be sustainable and weather proof and we would be able to set-up and take-down within a small amount of time. A “pirate enclave” or artistically known as an interactive guerrilla site.