"Pocket Notes" Submission

A couple weeks ago, I received an email from the curators of a project called Pocket Notes. The concept fascinated me: "we want the notes in your pockets that go through the wash, the notes on the nightstand, tucked beneath a glass of water on the kitchen table, in the glove compartment of your car or rediscovered in a book you took back to sell. we're looking for illegible diagrams, incoherent lists, definitions, histories, broken budgets and maimed poems."

Even though I scanned a note I carried around in my wallet until I dropped it in the Prairie Creek Reservoir while floating a cake (thus ruining it), I knew I had to submit images of all my lists. I photographed them this evening. Here is the latest incarnation with an artist statement (gasp):

On 2 June 2010, I started saving all my lists. Whenever I am confronted by a mass of objects, I have an irrepressible urge to count them. School was out of session and I was confused as to why I had to catalog so many activities. What was I forgetting? What needed to be done? Why was I constantly rewriting one when it became too messy to see what wasn't marked off? Every list I made was saved: items purchased at the grocery store, student participation in critiques, my goals to accomplish for the year (or the rest of my life), and states and countries I had yet to visit.

They are written on college ruled notepads, post-its, and recycled copy paper in Sharpie, black Uni-Ball fine point pen, and pencil. Everything was treated equally and nothing was immune if it comprised more than two items that needed to be checked off. 

Two years, four months, and five days later there are 806 of them with the date of completion inscribed on the back neatly bound in order. This evening when I photographed them for the first time in several months, I felt compelled to examine the earliest one. It was a list of art related activities I had to accomplish at school while preparing for a trip to Austin, Texas to float a Styrofoam cake in Barton Springs.

I don't know when I will stop collecting my lists but I foresee an unceremonious trip to the recycle bin (after extensive photographic documentation in the studio) when that occurs. In the meantime, they are a chronological marker that defines a mundane aspect of my life.

Lecture!

Welcome to Round 2 of the Fall Lecture Series... I'm spending the day working on another artist's talk. This one takes place Friday in Cincinnati for the Midwest Society for Photographic Education Conference. It's at 2:30 PM at the Hilton Netherlands in the Pavilion Room.

It's my first opportunity to discuss A Tale of Two Obsessions: David C. Nolan & Marilyn Monroe and Arline Conradt & the Cat Scrapbook. Last month produced a few new David C. Nolan discoveries that I haven't included on this blog as I'm hoping for some element of surprise on Friday. Translation: I get to talk about pornography (and cats!) in front of the general public.

If you are in Cincinnati, I hope to see you there!

New Acquisitions: September 2012

Left to Right: Small Problems in Living by Sarah Hobbs (an impulse buy); I've read many Murakami books but have overlooked Kafka on the Shore; Pacific Standard Time (because I wish I could have seen the exhibition); I like your work: art and etiquette (the few clips I read were so funny that I couldn't help myself); and The Archive (because it's what I do).

The Box That Holds the Lunch Bags

Little did I know this box would play a role in Hannah's paintings of the lunch bags. She showed me a watercolor of it last week and my first thought was "how did you flatten that box so well?" Trompe l'oeil baby, trompe l'oeil.

She painted it because it is the container that holds the containers and that philosophy fits well with our upcoming exhibition. Above is a quick photograph of the box in Hannah's studio with a pile of the lunch bags deteriorating on a daily basis alongside. Needless to say, I borrowed the box back and photographed it. This object that I deemed so insignificant, I didn't even recognize it's importance until Hannah documented it, may be the cover of our artist's book.

Save the date! Echo of the Object with Hannah Barnes, David Hannon and Jennifer Halvorson and yours truly is Friday 2nd November from 4-6 PM in the Atrium Gallery at Ball State University. I found out this week that our exhibition is not only traveling to Poland in April but will also be exhibited in Knoxville,Tennessee next summer. These bags are going places.

Meriç Algün Ringborg - "The Library of Unborrowed Books"

For years, I have wanted to visit libraries across the land and find the book that has not been checked out for the longest time to claim as my own for two weeks to photograph. Why? I want to embrace the rejected, loving it for a moment before returning it to obscurity on a random shelf. I think about this often but am usually engrossed in five other projects and continue to put it off, waiting for another time.

I instantly fell in love with Meriç Algün Ringborg's The Library of Unborrowed Books not because the artist did it before me, but because she did it so well. I still plan on completing it someday - it needs to be included in The Library of Loss Part 3 focusing on the book as conceptual art.

[All images above are Meriç Algün Ringborg's from The Library of Unborrowed Books]

From Ringborg's website:

"The Library of Unborrowed Books bases itself on the concept of the library as an institution manifesting language and knowledge, of the passing of awareness and the openness to all types of people and literature. This work, however, comprises all the books from a selected library that have never been borrowed. The framework in this instance hints at what has been disregarded, knowledge essentially unconsumed, and puts on display what has eluded us."

"Why these books aren’t ‘chosen,’ why they are overlooked, will never be clear but whatever each book contains, en masse they become representative of the gaps and cracks of history, or the bureaucratic cataloging of the world and the ambivalent relationship between absence and presence. In this library their existence is validated simply by being borrowed, underlining their being as well as their content and form by putting them on display in an autonomous library dedicated to the books yet to have been revealed. The first section of The Library of Unborrowed Books have opened Stockholm with 600 books that are unborrowed from Stockholms Stadsbiblioteket (Stockholm Public Library) for a period of three-weeks."

Christian Patterson & the Studio Backdrop in "Redheaded Peckerwood"

There is a penalty of not buying any art books before checking them out at the library. I often miss my window of opportunity to purchase a book before it is out of print because it took far too long for a library in the region to acquire it before I could request it. These days Ithaca College via interlibrary loan has provided me with my favorite books (thanks Ron Jude!) including the much praised Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson. Needless to say, I will be the first in line if a second edition is printed.

You can view many of the images in Patterson's book on his website (link above) but in no way does it replace the experience of paging through it. One day in Digital Imaging, I let one of my students borrow it and she nearly ripped out one of the notes adhered inside because she thought I left it behind.

Yes this book redefines storytelling and the photographic narrative. Yes it is an excellent combination of fact and fiction as Patterson retraces the tale of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Luc Sante in the New York Times sums it up well in this review: "His photographs are of actual settings, actual artifacts, symbolic landscapes and metonymic objects; there are also archival photos and reproductions of documents. Mr. Patterson is attempting something that hasn’t been done much: subjective documentary photography of the historical past. This requires that pictures stick close to the physical details while remaining ambiguous; each of the pictures, no matter how innocuous its contents may be, is unsettling and anxiety-producing. The accumulation thrusts the viewer into the emotional center of the story, in a way you could call novelistic. It’s a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land."

There is something else about Patterson's book that I can't stop thinking about and shockingly, it lies in the form of technique. The way he documents objects with the studio backdrop drawing attention to the location and the act of staging a scene fascinates me. I continue to explore the white background with the Autobiography series and am inspired by his use of wrinkles, tape, creases, props to hold the paper in place, tacks, etc. It also reminds me of John Gossage's The Contents of a Laboratory (another blog post coming soon).

All the images below are by Christian Patterson and are from Redheaded Peckerwood. Check it out at the library if you don't own it. It deserves all the praise it has received. Unfortunately, I figured this out a year too late.

1st Place

Ben Huntley and the Nine Fake Cakes Promo Postcard

Meta!

Some Belated Photographs from Vincennes

Vincennes was far more historical than I imagined it to be. It is the oldest European town in Indiana, established by the French in 1732.  The governor's mansion where William Henry Harrison resided before becoming the 9th President of the US is on campus. The rumor mill supplied that the previous water tower located in the same location as the one above was burned down by John Mellencamp when he attended the University.

I couldn't resist photographing this school bus on a walk around campus.

The lecture hall in the Humanities building has so many examples of color temperature occurring at a given time, I became overly fascinated with photographing the space before and after my talk. 

 Behind the stage.

A scary drop from a door.

After my presidential debate.

 These lunch bags are huge! After the closing reception.

 Drove back through Bloomington and visited the Chocolate Moose (they have vegan ice cream!) on the way to Muncie.

Kuba Prestige Panels at the John Waldron Art Center in Bloomington.

"This is about birds..."

Little did I know my interest in art featuring birds started in elementary school.

Remaking the template for "Strange Artifacts"

New paper.

New descriptions (not in cryptic metaphors).

Perhaps Strange Artifacts: A Found Object and Photographic Wunderkammer will be exhibited again.

If so, it's 100% organized (three days later).

"Somewhere to Disappear"

I can't wait to see this.

Vincennes University Installation

Morgan Ford Willingham gave me this disk of installation images from The Object Transformed at Vincennes University. I was very happy with the exhibition despite the awkwardness of having three different series seen at once (awkward as in I never thought of that way but it made perfect sense once viewing in person). Thank you for the opportunity to show my work, Morgan!

Archiving (Really) Old Artwork

Meow. A note to my grandmother shortly after I had braces (age 8). Yes I am including it in my response to Arline Conradt's cat scrapbook.

I am fascinated with what the back of the paper looked like that my brother and I scribbled all over as children (particularly the peacock page on the left). Is it from a book? Any guesses Mom?

Then I rediscovered the giant stack of paper that Javy and I always had access to for our drawings and what the source of it really was. This is going to make this project a whole lot more interesting once I finish up a few more things and devote some time to it.

Postcards as Promotion

Once upon a time on a visit to Springfield, Ohio to visit James and Tanya last year, I fell in love with the idea of using postcards as promotion. Here are nine of his that he gave me:




I made a promo card for the self-published book Nine Fake Cakes and Nine Bodies of Water last month (arrival = today) and I'm very happy with it. I have James to thank for this!

I wanted to maintain the element of "postcard" since that was an very important facet in the creation of the project (hence the lower opacity image on the back).

Next up, I'm researching places that will make half a dozen images made from a variety of series cheaply so I will have postcards of my own work available to send to people.

The Reason Why I No Longer Collect Lunch Bags

 My Mom bought me this:

Just another "fascinating" bit of information that will be unveiled in my talk at Vincennes University this week.

Autobiography: Swimsuits

I edited the swimsuits today. Excuse the poor photo. Once I make the plexi-glass boxes for presentation, there will be a far better image and a better reproduction of scale. These represent five years of my life for one place - Portland, Oregon. They will be accompanied by a towel that I used for twenty years. For the first time, the objects will be displayed alongside the photographs in the final presentation. I'm hoping to finish this for The Echo of the Object which opens at the end of next month.

Cats are coming through with the Claws

Vincent Fecteau, Chorus 3, 1994

A big old thank you to the 17 cats that are currently working for me (and their respective owners who are in charge of collecting):

Marco
Carlos
Jezebel
Oscar
Shera
Francis
Bob
Imogen
Marguerite
August
Mimi
Franz
Peanut
Jeff
Stanley Camper
Atticus
Boo Radley

I am en route to finishing the cat scrapbook project as soon as I come up with a couple artist talks and get the promo postcards for the Nine Fake Cakes & Nine Bodies of Water book out in the mail (they arrive in the mail this week). More soon...

Donald Abad's "I Did Not Own the Roden Crater"

Video still from Donald Abad's I Did Not Own the Roden Crater

One of my favorite parts about visiting all the major earthworks in the Western US is receiving emails from people who have done the same. Donald Abad emailed this link today with the video I Did Not Own the Roden Crater. He visited the same year we did and had  similar experiences with the man in the SUV watching over him in parts of the video, another man driving up in a truck to explain that the crater is closed, interactions with a barbed wire fence, and so on. Abad flies a kite while we flew balloons. I imagine they see it all from atop the crater. I'm looking forward to his return trip and what it produces in 2014.

I've often thought of the art I would make now about returning since all of the pieces have been experienced first hand. I have always known I will see the inside of Roden Crater but it probably won't be until after Turrell has passed away and it's opened to the general public in some capacity. I will be the white haired lady reminiscing about toasting beer to the guard on the ridge way back in 2010 or sneaking past the fence a few yards and burying an object from the past. In all likelihood, I will remain silent and not reveal a thing.

Wanted: Cat Claws

I am trying to fill this container. After months of searching for them on my hands and knees before I vacuum, I still don't have enough. It is one of the missing links in finishing A Tale of Two Obsessions: Arline Conradt & the Cat Scrapbook. Yes, your cat(s) will be credited for the contribution. Thank you!

An amazing thing happened this week...

This lead to this:

which simultaneously let to this:

and an upcoming feature in this.  More on the latter soon. 

Thank you everyone for your interest! I'm humbled by the viral spread of fake cakes on the Internet over the last week.

Now if only someone would pay me to make 100 more fake cakes and photograph them floating in a pool in Miami with pastel art deco buildings in the background in the dead of winter in the Midwest.  I can dream.