Today’s the last day of December and I’ve had a very productive holiday break. We still have snow here in Vancouver and it has been great for slowing things down and giving me time to focus on my nonsite project. I’ve been copying over a number of relevant posts dating back to summer 2007. My plan is to now begin to edit them, along with writing and interspersing the NSCAD 1974 to 1976 posts.
Kirby Dick and went to New York to stay in the NSCAD loft over the Christmas holidays in 1975/76. We flew out on December 26th and got caught in a whiteout that shut down all the east coast airports and our flight had to turn and go back to Halifax after circling Kennedy. We were on the same flight as Richards Jarden and his wife Marcia and so we ended up going to their place and played Monopoly while we waited for Air Canada to phone and tell us when our flight was leaving again. We flew out later that day into Boston and then flew on to Manhattan at 8am the next day.
The NSCAD loft was in a four story building owned by David Rabinowich and his bother Royden and Carole Conde and Carl Beveridge, on East 1st near the Bowery. NSCAD had the top floor. It was a rough open space with a few foamies for sleeping. Robin Peck had been there in the fall and had left some of his stone carver carved pediments. Kirby and I were there for a week over that Christmas break.
I remember eating potato latkes and knishes at the local Jewish delicatessen on the Bowery. That part of New York was rough is those days. There was a overall atmosphere of poverty and weariness. We knew to move through the streets with purpose. It was cold.
I don’t remember what was on in the galleries in Soho, but I remember spending a lot of time at Jaap Reitman’s bookstore on the second floor of Spring and West Broadway. I was working for the NSCAD Press by that time and Jaap Reitman’s bookstore was the definitive contemporary art bookstore. I wanted to make artist books.
Patti Smith had just released Horses, her first album with the Robert Maplethorpe cover. She was paying at the Bottom Line on the Village. There was a feature on her in the Village Voice and we got tickets. It was still the same club from the folk days in the ’60s and an amazing concert- electric. I can’t remember the songlist although I listened to that album endlessly over the next few years. John Cale came on stage and played bass for the encore- they did Gloria.
My only other vivid memory was Times Square to New Years!
We decided late that we would go to Times Square to celebrate New Years 1976. We caught he subway around 11:30 and headed uptown. Everyone was going tot he same place- 42nd Street/ Times Square. We got off around 11:50 and ran through the Times Square underground to get out on the street just before midnight. Thousands and thousands of people, hugging and kissing- it was very exciting to be a part of that human experience. There was an amazing air of optimism. I was just about to turn 25 six days later.
Under John Murchie’s supervision, Tony Duggan-Smith, Ann Prim and I spent the past two days packing and moving all the books from the old library on Coburg Road down to the new library on Duke Street. It is a great new location- beautiful big windows at the corner of Duke and Hollis Streets.
Art magazines and Reference books and the xerox room are on the main floor. The book stacks are on the second floor. Mary Snider’s slide library is on the third.
It is cold this winter, with snow around the city. We have had great fun making sleds out of the used boxes.
That library is the hub of NSCAD. Everybody meets here. The student mailboxes are just outside the door and the switchboard is at the checkout counter. The second floor is still pretty empty, with plywood still on the floors.
Spring Hurlbut has made a circular plaster installation two feet in diameter with a crown molding profile on the second floor.
The first thing I usually ask my son when I call him on his mobile phone is: Hi Kent, where are you?
Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to use mobile phones as a means to generate art and I’d like to propose location and movement as a subject for artwork. As society becomes increasingly mobile no longer tied to specific locations for telephone communication we are able to stay connected to our friends and family as we move through our daily lives. We used to be comfortable knowing that when we called someone, we could imagine where they were, knowing that their land line was fixed- in their home or office. Now with mobility, I still find myself with the desire to imagine the person I call- located somewhere and asking where are you? allows me to project my idea or fantasy onto their voice. I’m wondering if we can use location information as a way to generate images?
I came across this First International Conference on Mobile Society in September 2008 in Antalya, Turkey hosted by Mobile Life Events. They have just put out a call for papers.
New release of old Belle and Sebastian tapes in a double CD: BBC Sessions from 1996 with Live in Belfast, 2001. The first CD starts with The State I Am In:
I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975,
I was puzzled by a dream, it stayed with me for a day in 1995…
How often do my favorite songs from the past trigger memories of spaces and places. Belle and Sabastian vocals take me back to the late 90s, living on William Street, I was working in the quiet back bedroom that overlooked the back yard and studio. Kent was still at home finishing high school at Kits.
I began working 15 hours a week for the NSCAD Press in December 1974, when Jeff Balsmeyer left to return to California. I had met and talked with Garry Kennedy a little earlier in the fall about my interest in artists books and he hooked me up with John Hutcheson, who had just arrived as the Master Printer for the NSCAD Litho Workshop.
Garry told me he needed someone to handle receiving the order and mailing out the book for the Press. Four new books had been published and were just about to arrive. I was there when Claes Oldenburg’s Raw Notes, Simon Forti’s Handbook In Motion, Yvonne Rainer’s Work 1961-73 and Steve Reich’s Writings About Music all arrived. Donald Judd’s Complete Writings and Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover came out the next year.
We moved the books down into the basement of the Lithography Workshop on Hollis Street shortly into the new year and I continued from there.
Debbie McCarthy came to Halifax from Ottawa. She makes these beautiful paintings that look like old linoleum floors. She suspends herself over a canvas stapled to the floor and pours, drips and swirls wet paints around to replicate the look of old linoleum. I like the idea that she is reproducing the vernacular. There are workers in Linoleum factories in Scotland making the same paintings with linseed oil and pigments backing them on burlap and selling them for your floor.
Everybody was so in awe in his presence, he talked about trying to fnd a new form for film and photography. We are all curious to see his never released film Cocksucker Blues about the Rolling Stones 1972 tour. The deal was that he could show it five times a year, as long as he was present.
I can remember a moment as an art student, that I saw myself as an artist. It was December 1975, I was in Richards Jarden’s Projects class and we were each making an artwork for an end of semester exhibition in the Anna Leonowens Gallery and probably only up for a few days. I remember my intentions were to make work using bought materials from unusual but common sources.
I bought a ten inch, rawhide dog ‘chew’ from a pet store that I attached to the top of a thin, four foot dowel (purchased at a hardware store in Scotia Square) with a narrow length of electricians tape. The dog chew was painted grey and the dowel was white. I leaned it against the wall and looked a bit like a fireworks flare. I was very pleased with how it was made, my choice of materials and how it was finished and installed. I knew it was a smart object. It related to a desire to make art new again using unassuming materials at a modest scale in new configurations for the viewer to apprehend as fresh. I knew this work had an audience of peers and I now see how those values related to an imagined community of artists as a part of the contemporary artworld.
In 1976 I intuitively felt that I knew enough to make a contribution to the field. I was making work that were not only unique, but original and they were recognized as such. By 1977 I was being asked to exhibit in a number of different galleries in a few different cities. The work was getting recognition and press- it was of its time, yet also timeless; part of a larger history of artwork that not only was being made then, but referred to a larger history of contemporary art. That was a defining moment when I realized that I was an artist. I knew that I could make a contribution.
Back home after four days in Toronto, glad to be back. It’s also great to be able to listen to my own music: Dusty Springfield singing Gene Pitney’s Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa- simply amazing. What’s also amazing is what we’re able to find on YouTube- here’s the Gene Pitney version. Now when I’m listening to a song and I want to see it being sung- when I search YouTube, there’s usually not only the original, but covers and fan videos as well.
This is the end of the semester at Emily Carr and at Camberwell and I need some downtime. These past few weeks have been too busy. It’s good to have some time off to spend with friends and family. I turned over my Kingsway Luminaires concept proposal for a technical review Wednesday. I present to the selection panel on January 9th. I’m excited about the possibility of making a new outdoor lightwork.
I was in Toronto for Monday’s chat. Attendance is dwindling, not sure if everyone’s just too busy or it is lack of interest. It is hard to create a group dynamic from a distance. That’s something we’ve noticed with our online courses- there is difficulty sustaining a 15 week semester, and courses with shorter duration seem to work better.
The other book that I helped John Hutcheson print was Ann Prim’s Contusions, a book of poetry on the Heidelberg while it was still up on Coburg Road campus. In exchange John help me print my first two prints: All the Streets I Recognize in Halifax after Four Months and Streets with the Same Names in Halifax and Victoria.
long day, excellent talk on knowledge transfer by Geoffrey Crossick from Goldsmiths
Somehow this weblog got a day ahead of itself. Here in Vancouver it is 5:30 Friday afternoon, December 7th this posting reads December 8th- perhaps that’s because it is Saturday morning in London.
Sometimes a phrase just pops into my head- and it sticks there. I’m not sure why or how it is relevant but “all that is solid melts into air” arrived earlier this week and now I’m trying to make sense of it. The great thing about the internet is that you can now type in a phrase like this and find the source- in this case Marx and Engles:
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” (Marx and Engels, 1848).
Sublimation is the process where an element or compound changes from a solid to gas without an intermediate liquid stage. Dye sublimation is used in the printing industry to get images onto fabrics. More to follow…
The Olafur Elaisson’s Take Your Time exhibition at the San Francisco MOMA is truly amazing. It is the first time that I have seen his work, other than in reproduction. He is clearly interested in how the viewer experiences his work, there are 21 projects installed on the 5th floor. Each project tend to have its own room and there are several pieces built specifically for this exhibition including One Way Colour Tunnel, 2007
an amazing colour-effect and acrylic mirror corridor tunnel that you walk through, built to span the museum’s 5th floor bridge. His beautiful fan project Ventalator, from 1997 is in constant motion in the large entrance foyer as you enter the museum and his BMW H2R project car encased in ice in a large freezing room- (9 degrees Farenheit) which is on a different floor.
What is now clearly apparent to me, is that some of the ideas I have been thinking about for my own work with light need to be filtered and clarified in relation to my experience of Olafur Eliasson’s work. His Room for One Colour, 1997 for example is a room with intense yellow light similar to one I have been thinking about making.
He has repurposed the entrance waiting room, as you leave the 5th floor elevator you enter this room where the yellow light from eleven yellow bright monofrequency lights, mounted on the ceiling is so intense that all other colour- in people’s clothes for example is washed away- and seems either yellow or black. There is a complementary blue violet ghosting from the exterior natural light at one end of the room where he as installed Space Reversal, 2007 a mirrored space using mirror foil that you stand on a small bridge to look at yourself reflected in every direction lit by a window to the outside.
Overall I found the exhibition overwhelming- it was too much and at times I had vertigo experiencing some of the projects. I realize now that I am not interested in making work this spectacular. I have much more modest ambitions. I am not interested in overwhelming the viewer in this way. My intentions are to be more subtle and softer, and more domestic in scale. I realized I’m more interested in light that can be viewed within a domestic or office type of space. One of the dilemmas of the contemporary museum is that so often everything has to be on such a grand scale, such a grand gesture like grand manner history painting. Perhaps it is that the museum is competing with so many spectacles of modern life- the football match, the cinema and that as viewers used to the overwhelming aspects of life within the city we are conditioned to desire a spectacle.
I got soaked today! What was that Nick Nolte film- Who’ll Stop the Rain?
I’ve been editing my posts from over the semester. If we think about the artworld as an imagined community- what kind of a community is it?
Many years ago a friend told me to consider the history of art as this big river of artwork and ideas, a flow of ideas that you could engage with and be a part of- the artworld is that kind of community: a community of ideas that is open for engagement.
We arrived in San Francisco late Thursday evening after a two hour flight from Vancouver. At the airport I was struck by how beautiful the diagram of the layout of the airport was- for all the transit signage were these beautiful Illustrator files with bright rear lit colours- of the bold shapes on a black ground. I began thinking about how interesting it would be to see a number of these airport layout together. Every airport is has the same function, but each has a layout that has evolved over time and based on the specifics of the location, history and evolution. I will try to collect some and think about this further. There are two issues- the actual plan and layout of each airport and then there is the design of the diagram explaining that layout to the many passengers that pass through each day.
Yesterday we visited Montalvo Arts Centre in Saratoga below Silicon Valley and just west of San Jose. It is set in a beautiful, if slight bucolic setting in the Saratoga hills forested with eucalyptus trees- very beautiful setting. It has a number of artist studios most of which seemed to be empty. Late November seems to be a down time, or perhaps it is just because this is the weekend after American Thanksgiving. Richard Thompson is playing there next weekend so our timing was off a week.
We came here to see the Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time exhibition of new works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But also showing is the Jeff Wall: In His Own Words and Douglas Gordon: “Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now” but also featured is Lucy MacKenzie’s New Work. I’ve seen her work in reproduction but never in exhibition so I’m looking forward to seeing that exhibition.
We’re also going to see the Tino Seghal exhibition at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art.The Wattis Instsiute is the gallery asociated with the CCAs Graduate Programme and curated by Jens Hoffman.
More on my thoughts on these exhibitions shortly…