Anodyne
Saturday, July 09, 2005
 
Coats 5-11. I tricked up a pretty good easel from the old aluminum stepladder the VAG prep staff gave me when I left to run Anodyne (the self-funded office gallery I operated for a year and a half while psyching myself up to open Pulpfiction v.1), a piece of cardboard, and a surplus Ikea wooden stepstool. A piece of styrofoam salvaged from the box the color printer came in doubles nicely as a "palette."

Marcia Hafif's comments, blogged yesterday, are ultra-pertinent. The "art materials," freely selected, establish basic limiting conditions of their own: the size of the canvas (purchased off-the-shelf from the local art supply store, so as to disguise my ineptitude at stretching and tacking); the size of the brushes (smallish; at first I thought to use a roller, then concluded that that choice was ethically suspect. Why? I didn't know yesterday, but I do today. The work is about submerging or effacing one's personality. A roller provides no challenge -- the paint goes on smooth and even, "as good as it was in the can," to paraphrase Frank Stella. Whereas a brush implies "personal" or "authored" touch, like handwriting. And this project largely consists of extinguishing that touch, of making one's self over, however briefly, into someone else); the number of tubes of paint (as few as possible); the number of coats (enough to eliminate all traces of the canvas' texture, to create a flat seamless plane of color).

So: modernism again, art's materials gently nudging "intention" sideways, like Luna the whale harassing fishing boats in Barkley Sound.
- posted by cjb @ 12:20 AM


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