OLYMPIC BALLOONS (FOR LEAH), 2009
Installation
º•º
(DOCUMENTATION OF AN ATTEMPT TO POP FIVE BALLOONS AT THE SAME TIME)
∞I work from abundance and waste.
If everything was put to use, there would be nothing extra and there would certainly be no art.
The Internet isn’t necessary so I start there.
The ready-made was limited because it had to exist.
Art’s tactile existence is limited by space, money, effort, and scarcity of materials.
I don’t have those problems anymore.
I’m limited by the capacity of my imagination.
The utopian visions people hold in digital avatars as being a gateway to a Platonic realm of pure thought, I hold in the avatars of objects in Google image search.
Just as human beings are limited by the physical restrictions of being human, the ability to manipulate objects to their furthest means is limited by objecthood.
My sculptures, installations and photographs don’t begin or end physically.
These media designations are as fluid as the placement of any other context.
Media are cognitive restrictions to direct the meaning of an image in the mind of the viewer.
Each carry with it the weight of an artist’s statement- to say something is a sculpture specifies it further than almost any other characterization.
I recognize that all art exists as image.
Every painting we see on the wall and every sculpture in a vitrine is an image that alludes to dimensionality.
These things aren’t objects because they have no use value, art objects carry with them only sign value.
This holds true whether you are standing in a museum or on Google Reader- neither art can be “used”.
Like a hologram, art objects allude to an impossible dimensionality; an object without tactility is an image.
There is nothing about the scale of art that is tactile- scale is a perceptual marker.
Performance art and “relational” art also exist as images; they must be abstracted and distanced in our minds, in their location and in history books to become art instead of experience.
Relational Aesthetics exists in museums, though relational aesthetics occur everywhere.
All art exists as a fingers-crossed promise to viewership.
I believe in artist statements to understand work, though there is nothing factually binding about them.
The wall text that tells me a sculpture is made of iron is enough; I don’t need lab testing to determine its metallic content.
For me, there is nothing factually binding about a description of material or the existence of material altogether.
I expose myself to a world of fiction through art.
Art is a poesis of information.
If I wanted something real I’d look to most everything other than art.
The material existence of art is a privilege for those powerful enough to create elaborately useless things.
Imagine the greening effects of designating landfills as art museums.
Imagine a ’For The Love of God’ made of cubic zirconium.
We can accomplish so much more through fiction.
How preposterous does it sound; our trust of the metaphysical power of art objects lay in their material composition.
Art is a proposal for existence, but we tend to focus on existence as a requisite to consider what is proposed.
This is where we get “aura”.
Like a haunted house, many otherwise secular people line up to enter the museum to trick themselves into believing in the spirituality of inanimate objects and architecture.
I work from an understanding that art is inescapably on purpose: Walead Beshty is intentional.
Some feel those who initiate a process and step back are free from the strictures of narrative and intentionality.
This is like being surprised a number 3 came up when you rolled a pair of dice.
Who bought these die? Who drove to the store to get them? Where did that car come from?
We can appreciate the 3 for what it is, but let’s not trick ourselves into thinking rolling a 3 was an otherwise impossible feat or that telling everyone you rolled a 3 is somehow not a conscious choice.
I surrendered my pretensions of permanence; I’m just enjoying kicking the tide.
I want to make art that brings on the end of things.
This blog is me cherishing pointlessness in the way someone giggles before their execution.