Recent collage, using old book back, packing tape, magazine images and random color fragments
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Anxiety of Influence (Book Jacket, Back Flap)
Recent collage, using old book back, packing tape, magazine images and random color fragments
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Bresson, Puddle Jump
I love this photo. It's got awesome composition, a perfect sense of balance. And humor, for the man looks like he's been thrown forward somehow, about ready to fall flat on his face, or maybe disappear into a deep pool. Geoff Dyer talks about how many successful photos carry a sense of an "ongoing moment," as if the moment captured can tell you about what just came before and what will come after.
Crow Card
Appropriating, comic book stealing, 5 easy pieces, soft core porn old photo card with cigarette in hand and bad ass crow playing card, I Ching hexagram double abysmal
Black Birds in Green Yellow (AKA Eat Crow)
A new Bill Matthews painting. Color Wheel influenced, throw back emblem, mandala painting, tshirt image, poster image, badass crow painting with run over cross
Capt Marvel JR Joker Card
Our vision is our crutch, our vantage, our worldview, as David McConnvile said last night in his amazing Bucky-esque talk. We must step out of our own tv head and see with our whole bodies. The body as a can of paint. Thought as a heraldic tag floating above your head.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
socitom# 1
On Monday I viewed over 100 Ray Johnson collages. Some on Bill Wilson's "Wall of Ray," a salon style display (always changing) of Ray's work at all stages of his career. Others in a yet to be archived box, slipped into envelopes sent to a friend back in the 60s. Other on the gallery wall at Feigen's Johnson-Dali-Warhol show. Still others up on the top floor of the gallery, leaning against the wall, stacked two deep. Mostly collages, but also old paintings from back in his Black Mountain College days and drawings from his years at Cass High School in Detroit. Moticos in all the hues of the rainbow. Letters to friends with doodles on them; cigarette packs with notes on them. Altered postcards. Corrugated cardboard rectangles serving as backdrop for collage cut-outs. You name it.
I got back to my aunt Susan's neighborhood by dark, sat in a west village bar and sipped a gin martini. I needed the fortitude. The world around seemed altered to my sight; everyone was a cut out fragment pasted to a color-block. Store fronts felt like frames waiting for more glyphs to suspend themselves in their ether. I wrote down titles for mini-essays I will write one day. Tried to jot down stray fragments of what Bill Wilson said to me. His thoughts about laterality in Ray's work; the way he'd jump from a last name like Coffin and make it coffee then add "and doughnuts" and, and.... How one collage often spoke to another, was a response to a previous note from a friend, a reworking....How water ran through his collages, a ur-motif...How you can compare two things but not three...How Ray would walk through the east village with duct tape on his mouth. He called it duck tape. Remembering the photo of a stone wall, Ray's head and elbow gradually appearing as faux-stones at the top of the stack. The way he stood between two billboard O's, insinuating himself into the word, making himself a letter. I went to sleep almost sick with brain whirl. Woke at 2 to find the apartment ceiling draped in night shadow, undulating trees broadcasting their underwater images above me and slipping down the wall to encase the open kitchen space in its net of glyphs and watery letters.
Illumination Card
One in a series of Cpt. Marvel Jr. cards. Today it is my optimism card, a sign of the hope I feel with the Ray project, with my own work, that it won't rain so much today, etc.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Note from Ray Johnson to His Friend Frances
Back from New York. Amazed by the Ray work I was lucky enough to hang out with (more on that), by the perfect early autumn weather, by the High Line garden project in W. Village. Home after a long drive up into the mountains, light shining through and raindrops coming in brief waves then retreating. Mind aswirl with Bill Wilson's ideas on edges and nothingness and Ray's reversals.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Road Trip
Heading for Manhattan this morning. Going to meet with Bill Wilson, Ray Johnson scholar and old friend of Ray's. He's generously allowing BMCM+AC to borrow a selection of early Ray pieces for our show. Then I'll go up and catch the Ray show at Feigen. I'll be talking with Frances Beatty, their Director, about hopefully borrowing some pieces from the Ray Johnson estate. I probably won't have time, but I hope to get to the Frank AMERICANS show. I think it's opened already.
If I am lucky, I will meet with Elaine Sexton, poet and collagist, an old friend who sits with me on the Q Ave Press board.
In honor of this brief stint in the city, I have pulled out one of my first collages, early 90s. There are only two or three left from that period that I can still look at without cringing. This is one of them. Charles and I were joking (half joking) yesterday on the phone that having the postal exchange up on its own site is a little embarrassing. Did we really make those moves? But, then again, how great to see the progression!
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Skywalker
for Ali, on her birthday
You should see it: out in the field, a gang
of waxwings swarming low over corn stubble
converging in the field, perching in the trees,
screeches metal sheets rubbing over the river.
They swoop in the sky as a single organism:
Escher dance of white body to black, one huge bird
in flight now a thousand on the ground—waving,
wings in unison, a distinct whouck like laundry
snapped taut as they turn and bank in the late
afternoon light. Have I ever told you how
in the airport my father ran into David Thompson,
our favorite basketball player? “Skywalker”—
the skinny rocket-legged forward who dunked
on the heads of slow-footed 7-footers. They’d bumped
into each other in line for coffee, he’d always say,
sitting down for a few moments of light banter.
Two elegant, tall men—the poet and the athlete.
I was thinking about this the other day when I found
an old faded red-white-and-blue ABA basketball
trapped in a tree branch, bobbling in the river’s hands.
I was brooding on my father, who died on this day
nine years ago, so fished the ball out and brought it
to you. Can you decipher this childhood talisman,
made slick first by hands and hardcourt then water?
Will you help me bury it in these woods by the river?
When I return to the corn the day is newly written
and the waxwings have given way to crows marauding
in the trees, lost in a mystery play, a floating crap game
of complaint, my old friends. Here’s what the men
must have said. First: “How do you dance along
that thin strip of baseline like that, brother?” Then:
“How do you sketch words in the sky so birds come
together to rant inside the clouds?” “It’s easy:
I’m just a reporter standing at the edge of the field,
waiting out the tornado.” “That’s funny, sometimes
I’m a hawk swooping, others a bassline pulsing.
The ball disappears in my hands.” “Yes, yes, it’s as if
vision goes so fast into its next correct place
that you meet it coming back.” When you jump up,
you are really two forces converging” “Passion is all
the body needs for intelligence.” I say: “Sometimes
the wind hinders, sometimes the wind helps.”
Skywalker laughs. Then: “I’ll miss my flight.”
Dad: “Good luck tonight. Don’t let Dr. J go off
in the third.” I turn the bend in the river, dog out
ahead on the prowl, your face conjured,
and blow out as inspired breath a kiss to you.
Working the Post with Big Jim McKean
The animals in this neighborhood are waiting
for someone to talk to them. Pretty soon
they’ll get the picture: we no longer know enough
to see ourselves in their daily foraging.
Or in the red-tail hawk propped like a boy’s
favorite toy on the top shelf of an old oak,
peering longingly into the mute field
of this ritzy campus. What’s this got to do
with basketball, with four aging poets
enacting a slowed-down, heat-drenched game
of 2-on-2? Nothing, everything.
I’m down on the post, giving up 7 inches
and 50 lbs. to Big Jim McKean, who keeps
backing me down, putting me on his hip,
rotating left, right, the 8-foot hook
there every time. Lucky he’s rusty.
Who cares if he’s 20 years my senior—
he’s still got textbook moves he tried once
on a young Cassie Russell, on Kareem
when he was still Lew Alcindor. He times my shot
and swats it at the release.
This morning a rabbit blurred
back into the bushes. Tiny brown squirrels
darting under the trees. A house sparrow
picking at field-house garbage.
Just once I get Jim, if not off his feet
then off his balance, and take him left.
When he reaches out, I show him
my younger brother lefty scoop.
But only Alan’s in shape for all this
stop-and-start; it’s up to him to hit his shots.
Bob’s a natural but one step off
the pick and roll. There’s nothing
to do for the three pigeons
caught inside the fenced-in power station
but offer a small prayer; to transform
the smoke alarm battery squawking
all night into a dream hawk caught in a snare.
This morning Alan used one of my poems
to show a student how he might cut
against the rhapsodic he wears
like a Hawaiian shirt. And how to—
unlike the poem’s last two lines—avoid
falling off emotion’s cliff edge. Let me
leave you then not with the hawk
nor with Jim limping doggedly off court
but with Bob riding shotgun in someone’s car,
grinning. Outside after a long, loud dinner,
just beginning to feel sore, I stick out
my thumb jokingly for a ride. As he floats by,
Bob mouths, gleefully, “Fuck you!”
then flips me the bird.
A Collaboration in Friendship
A few years back, Laurie Corrall and Asheville BookWorks hosted a show of postal collages by Charles Farrell and myself made back in the late 90s.
Here's what she wrote about it: "At core of this unique show are 11 pairs of postcard collages exchanged by two artists over a year and a half period. The 22 pieces have been selected from over 80 original collages that, in total, literally embody a stage in a friendship. As a body of work, they display collaboration and creative play in all its awkward grace, demonstrating a gradual deepening of craft and sharpening of skill. By the end of the collaboration, both artists were using 100% of both sides of the card. As one of the collaborators exclaimed, “It’s amazing that the post office even got them to our boxes!
And here's what I wrote on the genesis of his collaboration with Charles Farrell: “Back in the late 80s, when we first met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—a small, coastal, artsy tourist town—a group of us took up all manner of creative play. We met at cafes, put on loft parties, took road trips, explored the streets of the town. And it wasn’t long before we were ‘stealing experience,’ a term Charles and I made up to describe this trespassing play. Our goal was to wake each other up, make art, and laugh a lot in the process. We were also interested in inhabiting private realms in public places and finding ways to cross boundaries normally restricted in everyday life. So I guess these collages became another way for us to engage in subversive play.”
Charles wrote of his creative process: "Our daily world is often a moving collage of people, images, and events. The fragments of the day and the remnants of my night time dreams inspire my creative vision. In the collage work I have found a true medium to express my greater perception of the world I view. One of the aspects I have enjoyed in my collaboration with Sebastian appears in the aftermath of the creative process. A completed postcard is promptly mailed and forgotten. The US postal service then becomes an unwitting collaborator in the process, as the work moves through the chaos of various sorting machines to be scanned, cancelled and, hopefully, delivered intact."
Friday, September 18, 2009
.jpg)
+.jpg)
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Walking Man
Another early "collage" by my bro, Bill Matthews. This is a small painting on top of a piece of cardboard. The walking figure is done in some sort of metal. I need to ask him how he did it, if he heated up the metal and poured it or what...
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
"& Related Ephemera"
One of a set of drawings made by my brother as part of a collaboration with me, the younger snotty one, on a written piece called, boldly, "17 Ways of Looking at a Woman." I wasn't much older than 17 myself. But I handset the thing, ineptly, and he made drawings, adeptly, which I xeroxed and spray-painted and then placed in industrial boxes, off-white and fold up like a pizza cartoon. More to come.
Here's the back of a collaged postcard (circa 1997) I sent to Charles in an on-going and sporatic series over about a ten year period, with Charles sending collages to me. We got into this game in trying to hide the stamp in the scene or design of the image so much the guy couldn't tell we'd stamped it. And to hide the address or make it difficult to find, etc. Don't tell me whoever stamped this didn't have a good time getting those wavy lines just so, so they covered the plane like that!?
I have found that 1 Shot collages are a lot like haiku, for the act of both involve a speed, a fluid confidence in image choice, cut, placement and glue. They are like little magic tricks, or fireworks, or a really good pass made on a fastbreak, a lookaway bounce pass to the man cutting to the basket, right up at his chest so he can take it in motion and jam the thing with one step.
I limited myself, on the spot decision, to only an old picked-through Life (the one soon after Kennedy was shot), a Marvel Superhero Gallery of Villains and some old floral magazine from the 60s or 70s.
I started seeing a pattern between 3 sets of three and arranged the images accordingly, keeping Superheros and Celebrities on the wings. Flowers in the middle. Seemed like a good thing to have a balance of men and women. Words could come through from the now famous postcard set with supposedly sultry and sassy quotes on them, but not many and only if they somehow gave me a sense of how I'd title the thing. Mostly matching by eye, color, mood, cheeze-factor (needed to by high), etc. I had the set for some other project (Literary Hero Cards: Andre "the Giant" Gide, Albert "The Blade" Camus, stuff like that) but it stalled and I finally gave in. They were near at hand when the 1 Shot Craze swept my nation.
1 Shots, by nature, must be bold, either in theme, color or camp. You have to make a joke but can't try too hard. You want it to look cool. As if you were making a set of playing cards or tarot cards or superhero all-star baseball team cards.
Take it from there.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
This is an early collage. One of those mysterious gifts. I just read somewhere, quoting a quote, that the muse doesn't offer inspiration--paraphrasing madly here--but points to the window and says, "Look at that! Look at the view!" Go walk out in it." I am butchering it. But you get the gist.
(the red strip down the middle is actually a wine stain, a splash I let slip when returning to the image, 1o years later. Ray Johnson was always trying to get the piece to keep living, over and over...)
(the red strip down the middle is actually a wine stain, a splash I let slip when returning to the image, 1o years later. Ray Johnson was always trying to get the piece to keep living, over and over...)
Cat in the Sack
The journals above the cat and in the bird are Kerouac's, from his on the road period, taken from an article about the journals as artifacts in Harper's. Just thought you should know. (Insider info.)
Irwin Kremen
Here's a collage by former Black Mountain College student, Irwin Kremen. This guy's a master.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)