Saturday, September 28, 2002

Notes on Endless Column, Blue and White Variation

Joseph Heller wrote sometimes a great notion.

Which amounts to as good an explanation as any for regurgitating Constantin Brancusi as a new series of work. Like Bruce Nauman whose affinity for puns translated into photographic exercises as text, substitute cultural context to remake Bird in Space or At the Beginning of the World. Perhaps outcome is manifest sculpturally through aforementioned orientalia. What began as paraphrasing with blue variation of the Endless Column via porcelain rice bowls begs a complete sentence.

A fuller picture to define this investigation needs to be developed.

Saturday, September 21, 2002

Upon traveling to British Columbia

In the course of very long respites, the urge or obsession to record simply subsides as far as very long respites go. Distractions naturally occur. Like travel abroad from within domestic borders. But let me backtrack first.

The onerous prospect of facing a seven day work week unabated from Labor Day until just before Christmas proved a demoralizing realization. Enough so to prompt a preemptive strike as a means to compensate. One week or five days plus the weekend away in exchange for one hundred and five consecutive times of punching the clock is sure enough Luddite arithmetic, but given the creative accounting philosophies affecting current economics, who is to say otherwise.

And so explains somewhat the rather conspicuous layoff. Revivification meant time spent on the Sea to Sky Highway roaming the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia in a rented Buick Grand Marquis replete with luxurious leather upholstery and powered doohickies to satisfy even the most discriminating of retired senior citizens. On the road minus Keroauc retracing in fact some of his footsteps unintentionally certainly defined a sense of place as inhabited by a prior and palpable history. To look at locales witnessed by the eyes of those countless before us fits what Roland Barthes espoused in Camera Lucida of a photograph of Napoleon taken by his sibling. The awe he held of sharing the same perceptual "space" if you will that "stared into those eyes" failed to breathe the intense revelation to perplexed colleagues when the French philosopher recounted this experience.

The purely visual is sometimes hard to translate.