The Last of This Summer's Water Collections

James K. Russell, Long Beach, Washington

I asked my father to make a drawing in the sand. He found a stick from his yard and packed it in the car. He had no idea what he would make and neither did I. He thought this was much larger than it turned out to be and I envisioned it was closer to the water.  Since my mother was a prominent feature in the Idaho photographs, I wanted my father to be a part of the project too. Note to self: I have skills convincing my parents to do things for my art without any forewarning.

The end product though the "ruffles" kept getting in the way. As with the residency's water photographs from earlier this summer, I am not sure if I will use many of these or what the final outcome will be. For now they are merely a collection and one day when I finish every location, they might transform into something else.

 
More from Long Beach.

Cannon Beach, Oregon (After Gerhard Richter)

Posing as we all do, Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon

I will return to Cannon Beach to photograph on a day when it isn't so crowded and warm (yes, warm!) at some point in the future. The two images above document the location where this came from...

... (wishing it was completely full but knowing I can take it back).

You know what this means? I finished everything above the line on the list I made in April. Add a few locations I forgot from Idaho and last year's trip to Texas (which produced this and this) and I am over the half way point in the autobiography of water series (I need a real title, damn it). I hope to complete the final destinations by Summer 2016. Yet another long term project in the making.

College Ruled and Graph Paper in the Mike Kelley Retrospective

The following three photographs were taken of Mike Kelley's drawings and photographs at PS1 MoMA. Thank you PS1 for changing your photography policy!

One of my favorite details of the Mike Kelley Retrospective was his use of paper - both handmade and found. They were painted and photographed with text written in block letters, neatly and sloppily.

Around the same time I saw this, I finished an entire page of "Names People Think I Am Called" that begin in 1999 while working for the Houston Center for Photography. I have struggled with how to present it (currently it's written in a spiral notebook from Archaeology class in undergraduate school). I am now brainstorming whether or not I want to apply some techniques other than "found."

There is a growing pile of cardboard notebook backing in my studio. With school and work combined, I produce a great number of these over the year. They might make an appearance in the resolution of a few lists.

It doesn't hurt that I take a great deal of notes that look like this in faculty meetings (grow cardboard pile, grow).

New Year's Resolutions

In Alain Botton's essay "Making Resolutions" he states: "We don’t tend to make resolutions about things we completely believe in. It just comes naturally. But we do resolve all the time to be kinder or more hardworking, because a sizeable part of us loves being cruel and sitting around. A resolution always hovers over a grave inner conflict and constitutes a vow by one part of ourselves against another. Which is why – according to some - we should never be so foolish as to make a resolution. And yet we need resolutions - even if we don’t actually manage to carry them through or rather, precisely because we rarely manage to do so."

I always hated this action and spent many years avoiding it (because it ended in failure every time), preferring to assess the next year on my birthday, looking not only into the next 12 months but 24, 60 and beyond. It makes more sense particularly since that date coincides with the start of the academic year.

Last year, two things happened. I only saw one movie in the theater in 2012 and vowed to change that. I reinstated the end of the year resolution with something that would be easy to achieve: see one good movie a month that was not viewed on my laptop but in public on a big screen. It started off well but along came the summer blockbuster rut and in early November, there were seven weeks left to see six films. Fortunately, there was a plethora and the cramming began.

I should have realized how impossible it was to see one a month (with the good stipulation) and accepted the fact that twelve over the course of the year was sufficient (hell, it beats one). Needless to say, mission partially accomplished. A new goal is set for 2014 featuring an activity that I have grown to love out of the necessity of living in a small town: cooking. Here's to improving the quality of life outside breathing art and school every hour of each day.

School is Out For Winter

First things first, visit the library for reading material:

Conquer my fiction list that continues to grow rather than shrink.

Sleep for a week.

Prep for next semester.

Photograph water, edit images and print in an empty photo lab.

Visit this:

Maya Ben-Ezer, Shift Key (image courtesy of the above link)

Another List in the Making

I may have downloaded my Twitter archive this week. I may be counting hashtags. It may be final critique week where another mindless method of creating artwork has overcome my tired brain.

Fortunately, I do not overuse the hashtag so this is not a painful task. As I cut and paste them into a Word document, I cannot help but notice their merit as yet another list that defines who I am. Hello Autobiography.

Jonathan Lethem and Allison Freeman on Lists

"We make lists of things we want to remember, and then we lose the lists. My life is a tattered assemblage of abandoned calendars, misplaced agendas, water-damaged address books with names blurred, family trees I've never managed to hold coherently in mind, third cousins unrecalled named for third uncles unmet, files of papers I've misplaced or never look into, schoolwork praised by teachers with faces I can't bring to mind. I once found a packet of love letters from a woman I couldn't recall. A list of mummified sentiments as useless as a grocery receipt. Our memories may be tomb-worlds, after all, a place to spare others having to dwell. Whereas the one thing I am sure I can remember about your eyes is that each time I see them they'll be eyes I could never have forgotten. We list things in order to cross them off, to relegate them with relief to the kingdom of amnesia. So leave me off your lists."

Jonathan Lethem
"Things to Remember"
The Ecstasy of Influence

Allison Freeman (via)

Two Collections that are Well Padded Yet Difficult to Steer

Romuald Hazoumè, Pied à terre, 2004

If you think the bicycle in Hazoumè's photograph looks overloaded, wait until you see Noah Sheldon's video below. In the words of Wholphin #14 (that I finally viewed last week), it is indeed "a most unusual way to protect your bike."




Noah Sheldon on Vimeo

I cannot help but love the ingenious methods of transporting the collection, no matter how dangerous  it may be. I am also curious about the breaking point or when it reaches too difficult to handle. How was that lesson learned and was it inadvertently repeated? Hazoumè's photograph and Sheldon's video are my metaphors for the pile of 1045 lists that I ceased collecting and posted about last week. I was drowning, much like this, in their teetering mass.

1045 Lists

I shipped my lists to Ucross, Wyoming and gave myself permission to cease collecting them while on the residency. Another artist asked me why I stopped and the reason is simple: they were taking up too much room on my bookshelf, in plain sight, and were making me uncomfortable. It is liberating to toss every list that I've made since into the recycling bag.

During Photolucida last April, I was told on a couple occasions to be as obsessive with my objects as David C. Nolan and Arline Conradt were with theirs. After fumbling around with a couple other ideas, I kept coming back to the lists. What could I do that was even more over the top than collecting and counting them? First step: photographing them in neat piles. I do not like what will come next but it will be challenging (and within that, I hope "interesting").

"In flagrante collecto (caught in the act of collecting)"

I may have read about the sculptor Marilynn Gelfman Karp's illustrated catalog in the New Yorker a year ago. In any case, it moved up the Interlibrary Loan List and here are some highlights:

Marilynn Gelfman Karp, Framed Soap Shards, 1995-2004 and Group of Soap Shards, 1995-1999

Marilynn Gelfman Karp, Framed Soap Shards, 1997-1999

Marilynn Gelfman Karp, Framed Soap Shards, 1995-1998

"Robert G. is an artist, a painter fascinated by the way objects age and wear down. He collects nubbins of soap that are too small to be comfortably functional. Unlike the yellow laundry soap of yesteryear, these soap shards are softly curved and as polished as beach pebbles. Many of these soap bars started off with curved edges but all were molded from creamy skin-anointing unguents that yield to the human hand. Robert arranges his soap ostraca in much the same way that Victorians displayed geological specimens or fossils or seashell collections. They are framed in poetic passages that are evocative of the curiosity cabinets of an earlier time. Before I knew Robert, each sliver of my last soap bar was merged with the next as a smaller Siamese twin. Now there is symmetry to my lathering, and something that would have inevitably disappeared with use has instead become a lasting and artful artifact of our time."

Marilynn Gelfman Karp, Swimmer toothpick and snuff scoop (open and closed), 1925

 Marilyn Gelfman Karp, Group of Shopping Lists, 1988-2004

"The most primitive purpose of a list is memory prompting... Lists satisfy the collecting urge and are free. Lists themselves are material, though barely so."

Marilyn Gelfman Karp, Group of Shopping Lists, 1987-2004

"Shopping lists run the gamut of naïve to sophisticated, mundane to poetic, stodgy to flamboyant, offhanded to earnest, vague to obsessively specific. Written for oneself, there is no self-conscious reserve."

Studio at Ucross

Rock studios - approach by bicycle

Rock Studio #3 where I spent the most time

Studio editing and table set-up

Second best use of a Fed Ex account: ground delivery of all of this that arrived on the second day

Samples of paper dipped in Clear Creek

Temporary installation of 139 books checked out via Interlibrary Loan and read in a 13 month period (still processing this piece but it will be featured as a list in some capacity).

Tape leftover once the Interlibrary Loan slips were removed.

Umberto Eco - "The Infinity of Lists"

I packed Eco's illustrated book on the history of art and literature in relationship to the list to once and for all read and conquer during my residency. Mission accomplished!

Eco differentiates between "practical" and "poetic" lists, an area I found fascinating. From page 374: "A restaurant menu is a practical list. But in a book on culinary matters, a list of the diverse menues of the most renowned restaurants would already acquire a poetic value. In the same way, one might daydream about an abundance of an exotic cuisine on reading (not with a view to ordering, but for aesthetic reasons) the menu of a Chinese restaurant with its pages and pages of numbered dishes."

Rosa Klein (André Rogi), Bonnard's Palette, 1930 (from Coherent Excess)

Eco included Wislawa Szymborska's Possibilities (1985) in the section on "The Rhetoric of Enumeration":

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

He breaks down the list into 21 categories including the visual, collections and treasures, mass-media, coherent excess, and the "ineffable." I was reacquainted with my love of the wunderkammer and know that I will probably make art about that subject matter again (hello site specific installation).

Notebooks & Weathered Paper

It will come as no surprise that I collect old paper. This started in graduate school when I constructed artist's books that needed to look worn. Over the last two years, I have accumulated numerous notepads (filled and emptied). It is my greatest hope that they will offer resolution in the presentation of many of the lists in the Autobiography series. I nailed these to the side of the house for one month yesterday:

 
I hope they will look like the drawing pad Jay Defeo used to adhere her photographs in the image below. I sneaked this terrible snapshot to remember the presentation at her Whitney Biennial retrospective in March.

Since the rental cave is a brick box, I hung them higher than planned. They have until mid August to look less 2012. Let's hope the Midwestern summer cooperates with my first time experiment with weathering paper.

One of My Oldest Lists: Places to Visit

I have a woven box inherited a couple decades ago that holds money from different countries I have visited. I do not open it too often as I am not in the habit of traveling overseas regularly (malheureusement). Last week, upon depositing some korunas, forints, and zlotys, I was reacquainted with one of my oldest lists.

My friend, Anabel Lopez, and I made this while sitting in a park in Galicia, Spain in August 1995. Some of the entries were hers and some were mine. Remarkably we shared many of the same desires in places where we wanted to travel. The following year, I managed to visit Europe again and marked off some of the countries. I have never felt compelled to check them off after that (and part of me wished I had not started).

I studied this list for awhile, noting how the ink faded, wondering if I had accomplished much in the last 18 years of travel. Interestingly, I lived in some of the places and indirectly created a series, From Venice Beach to the Venice Bienale, from a couple of the entries.

Of course, I had to update the list - the new one is far more descriptive and rather than shrinking, it has grown. Perhaps I will give myself permission to cross the countries off or scrawl new ones underneath. Now the old one exists as a record in a box of old change. I will probably hang onto it until it's illegible, contemplate photographing it, then finally admit that it is yet another object marking the passage of time (and place and the endless search for something, somewhere else).

Jacqueline Suskin's "Go Ahead and Like It"

Oh how I love lists as an art form. Check out Jacqueline's new book project Go Ahead and Like It:
 

Her blog hosts an array of other people's lists in many formats (computer monitor, smartphone, and real pieces of paper). You can send your own to this address: listoflikes@gmail.com

It took me two months but here is mine:

Many feature activities that can only be done in the summer. I am trying to be patient as I only have two and a half more weeks of school (minus the one I am taking off for Photolucida). I am hoping to experience some of them very soon!

Matthew Mullican's "Untitled (Birth to Death List), 1973

Matthew Mullican, Untitled (Birth to Death List), 1973 (image via)

Allan McCollum writes (from the link above):

"The reading (which is done in a subdued light) begins with the statement, "Her birth," and continues through around 200 or so cryptic phrases, ending with "Her death". These phrases describe what could be isolated memory images, or "moments" in a person's life, such as, "Hearing her mother upstairs," "Her best friend's brother," "Thinking about her son's life," or "Forgetting her age". The entire life of an unknown and undoubtedly fictional person is condensed into ten minutes worth of short, evocative statements, which are paraded through our mental apparatus almost faster than we can represent to ourselves the images which they invariably invoke. The accumulated effect of this assault on our image-forming capacity is an unquestionable growth of empathic feeling, or nostalgia; it is a feeling we would not have anticipated experiencing as a result of listening to a purely rote reading of such simple phrases which refer to a completely fictional human being of whom we know nothing, and have learned nothing. Again, we recognize an authentic and powerful poignancy in our response — not of the familiar sentimental sort that we are accustomed to feeling while, say, watching a melodrama, where we have willfully suspended disbelief, but a response which bypasses our will in the way spontaneous feelings develop in more appropriate circumstances, i.e., real life."

• my favorite list viewed of late
• one of the best artworks in Blues for Smoke at the Whitney Museum
• enraptured by a life encapsulated on one page
• favorite line: "noticing that the sky is a light shade of blue"
• unfortunate fact: my age is roughly located at the bottom of the third column
• perhaps a list is the best obituary?

Year End Lists

2012 ended 30 November when it comes to Year End Lists. I haven't participated in a public one since That is So Last Year in 2003 (a 50+ page zine that had all the potential to continue in 2004 but sadly, did not). This year Drew DeBoy who is blogging up a frenzy (making me feel guilty) asked me to participate. Thanks for the opportunity Drew!

New Acquisitions November 2012

Justification: I needed to buy a dish wand replacement sponge. Since I live in a painfully small town, my only source was Amazon. Wondering what else was in my shopping cart, produced a larger, heavier package than I initially anticipated. Clerk Fluid = long overdue acquisition by Clark Flood (AKA Mark Flood), I heard Now We Are Hungry was the best Dave Eggers book on short stories, Jonathan Letham's The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. has resided on this "to buy" list for a long time, and Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists was my impulse purchase (I can't believe I didn't check it out from the library first). Now all I need is some free time to read.