Scroll Works (2023)

My post this week will cover my work from the last three weeks, especially concerning my installation work “scrolls”.  This is a working title, as I don’t believe that the work is finished, and I have not fully synthesized either its content or a finished state. 

The work is an installation, meant to be displayed in various conditions and examples.  It consists of long scrolls of mulberry paper, that have been written on by typewriter, specifically an Olivetti Studio 45 from 1969, and an Olympia SM9 from 1971.  Each scroll is an unedited automatic poetical exercise.  During my practice I sit down at the typewriters, and distance myself from contemporary distraction.  This includes silencing my cell phone and laptop notifications, as well as removing my watch and turning off music.  If it is particularly loud outside I might wear ear plugs.  The focus is important as distraction interrupts what I feel is the rhythmic spontaneity of developing poetry.  The exercise is about clarity of ideation over a specific period.  Because of this the project may sprawl into the realm of performance, or into a collaborative aspect encompassing the viewer.  The typewriters unique ability to render the writing of all people using it in the same type and appearance (while also being disconnected from electricity and the internet) is compelling to me, but is also somewhat unclear why.  Perhaps it is only the one level of mediation that speaks to me, and not the many, almost infinite mirage of the internet. 

Many of the poems, and prose contained in this first example are left unedited in the installation.  They contain errors of spelling and punctuation, as well as inconsistent word use, or a misapplication of syntax.  They break many rules, but this is intentional, and I hope compelling, as it seems to point to some sort of human frailty or failing against systems we deem need be consistent and unblemished. 

The scrolls are crumpled, dented, folded, sometimes reversed, they overlap, and also fly out from the wall limiting space ahead of them and proclaim themselves more as objects then as writing.  They exist in 3d space, much as sculpture does, and the inclusion of the cigar boxes, to both weigh down the flowing paper, imply that they will be stored and concealed at a later time.  The scrolls also occasionally include semi opaque mirrors, applied with clips at various heights which interrupt and reflect the reader/viewer at different angles and times. 

It is my intention to now edit the writings in the installation, to develop a publication of a first iteration of this kind of installation.  This publication would serve as documentation of the installation as well as an edited, concise presentation of the more pleasing and relevant poetics contained in the scrolls.  I expect that the documentation and writing for this publication will extend beyond my residency in Chicago for this year, and will involve work in the Fall semester.  However, since several bodies of work have been built in parallel, I intend to document with photographs, and then systematically package and store this work with the other studies and materials so that they may be recreated or unearthed at a later time.

Artist Talks

For your consideration…

Adolfo Ruiz

Week 2 (Process)

Digital Approaches

It is ironic that in a digital approaches class that most of my practice is involved with a decidedly analog mindset.

My routines for my practice include rising early, exercise, coffee.  These procedures are periods of time when I synthesize ideas for my work.  Often during exercise, I find that my mind will work over projects.  Typically, my art practice now begins with concept.  This could be a vague idea of form or a subject.  The notion is something I will mull over and decide upon a form from which I will begin to work. 

My day after this typically involves a detailed rundown of my schedule to make sure I am on time and have my work complete.  Then I will begin “detailed work”.  Detailed work involves the actual haptic making of a piece.  Most of the time I consider the work that comes out of these sessions to be studies, such as drawings, photographs, or sculptures that are rough in shape and idea.  These sessions are usually 4-5 hours long, with a break for lunch.  After this I return home, or If home I take a break to make dinner.  After dinner is done, I may have a hour or two of research which would involve reading or learning about theory, artists, or criticism, and then bed. 

I think I developed these habits due to my previous work schedule before coming back to school.  I would often not have time to get to a studio, per se, but during working hours or at lunch could make time to think about what it was I wanted to accomplish.

I am not convinced that this is the best way for me to make work.  I would prefer a more stade, and serious schedule.  I think that as a transition into such a schedule my current project is accomplishing just that.

For instance, one of my current projects is typewritten paper scrolls, that form a kind of poetic diary of automatic writing.  I began by thinking about how we as a culture ceaselessly document and retain large swarths of our daily lives, through our mobile devices especially.  The information we retain with these tools is not so much what interests me but more the engagement with the tools.  By writing on these mulberry scrolls I am creating a visual art work that is familiar in form vis a vis the aspect ratio of texting formats, but denies the infinite sameness by using a substrate that retains a uniqueness.  The works also change from a purely communicative medium into a visual one.  The ink bleeds in unusual ways, capturing interest in the random.  This work is incomplete, and I think that an incorporation of installation that engages the viewer farther is necessary to convey the idea, or prompt more interest.

By adapting my schedule to involve a type of recording I think that this work will eventually change my schedule to a writerlier process oriented scheme.

I also work on more than one project at a time.  I have been making cartoonish drawings that feature eyeless floating heads that connect and contort one another, as well as a series of photographs that continue a body of work about looking at art in museums, and how the art looks back.    With multiple irons, I can always try to find something that drives my interest, in that I have a somewhat mercurial or scattered attention.

Definitions...

My practice is now a deconstructive and reconstructive affair.  Experimentally I want to discard with the method of what I have been doing.  It is strange that as an “artist” artist we are so often trained to make work like we have been making.  This effort makes sense in the context of an artworld that requires products, pieces of material goods that can be shifted and traded.  It makes very little sense if we are striving to develop new perspectives or discover personal interests outside of the comfort of control.  Looking is extremely important to my work, so perhaps I should destroy it.  I often come across this predilection to antithesis in my thinking.  Creating the opposite to illuminate the differences.  Assuming the negative to solve the proof.

            For professional practice I imagine a schedule.  A repeatable set of parameters that occur each week.  This of course sounds like a job. Because I believe that art is a job.  I also believe that teaching art must be a part of my practice.  This is because teaching a thing makes you better and more informed on that thing. Writing for me is becoming increasingly important, so perhaps books, and articles enter into the equation of a practice.  The objects themselves (books) have a strange magnetism that transcends most peoples experience.  People love books. 

            Musicians practice, they set aside time every day to stretch and expand, go over material, doing it multiple times, pushing the artworks farther forward.  Art making is like practicing Mozart without a score.  Or rather, hoping that you are practicing Mozart but can’t quite tell until you hear the recording if it is Mozart or not.  A physicist said something recently that stuck in my brain: “ The secret of success is moving from one failure to the next without diminished enthusiasm.”  I respect this concept immensely, and it comes as a comfort. 

Practice

noun

1. habitual or customary performance; operation:

            office practice.

1. habit; custom:

             It is not the practice here for men to wear long hair.

1. repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency:

            Practice makes perfect.

1. condition arrived at by experience or exercise:

            She refused to play the piano, because she was out of practice.

1. the action or process of performing or doing something:

            to put a scheme into practice; the shameful practices of a blackmailer.

1. the exercise or pursuit of a profession or occupation, especially law or medicine:

             She plans to set up practice in her hometown.

1. the business of a professional person:

            The doctor wanted his daughter to take over his practice when he retired.

1. Law. the established method of conducting legal proceedings.

2. Archaic. plotting; intrigue; trickery.

3. Usually practices. Archaic. intrigues; plots.

            I think I love definitions because they are finite.  Like math or sports they provide a concrete answer, or result that is clear, and is something to rely on.  Art of course is challenging because of its openness.  Its indefinability.  Even if the work does not sell, an artist may have achieved the highest pinnacle of success.  The game is defined by rules that are as fluid as the art itself.  I think this might be why more people do not become artists.  It’s just too much uncertainty.

            I want to take my practice out of the ordinary.  I have held myself for years to strict regimens of content and process.  But that might have squandered opportunities for important work that has been left in the margins.  That work is going to have its day.

Juxtapositional Aethestics

My practice is one that reflects, when I say this it sounds simple, but I would argue that all of our practices reflect.  Reflection is both a physical and metaphorical activity.  I use reflection as a starting point, based around my personal theoretical writings which I call juxtapositional aethestics.

            Recently I would have told you I make images, and these images are derived from my opinions and experiences of historical and found artworks, fed through biological, digital, and sculptural processes to try to squeeze an outcome out of interaction and an examination of the mediation of technology.  I strive for the engagement of a community when I think about art.  To me art is community.  Without this engagement the meaning is lost, the meaning that flows from personal expression or opinion that passes from one object or image into another person’s perception.  This continuity of exchange is what I believe we call contemporary art.  Currently I would say my art practice is enveloped in writing about my art practice which evolved from exercises and reading art theory and becoming increasingly more confused about why I was doing this thing I called art.  I concluded that I needed my own art theory to clear my head and so my personal art theory goes like this: Queue Sweeping Declaration

            All art - (just to be clear: I believe that art is what artists make, and artists are those people whom artists, critics, curators, and gallerists, acknowledge as artists.) - So… All art is made in contrast against or in complement to the historical.  And could also be both. 

            Due to unconscious or conscious cues in the shape, forms, sounds, colors, and compositions of work, we propagate “art” forward in history as either a direct contrast, which I call juxtepositional, or symmetrical compliment of what has come before.  Therefore: I see a chicken, I draw the chicken, and have completed a pleasing symmetrical composition of the real chicken.  This chicken drawing is seen by my classmate at school who enjoys drawing as well, and attempts to draw a chicken, creating another chicken drawing with a similar composition.  Another friend of mine on the bus sees both chicken drawings and decides that they don’t like chickens, or drawings, and steals the chicken drawing from me and burns it on the sidewalk after we leave the bus as a dramatic performance piece, creating what I would posit is a contrasting or “juxtepositional artwork”.  Angry at my friend over the theft and burning of my drawing, despite its use in an important performance work, I resolve to spend the next sixty years executing exacting chicken drawings.  These drawings eventually are shown together as a retrospective after my death, including a re-creation of the initial chicken drawing burning performance.  These events further canonize my contributions to art and culture, and become themselves symmetrical art creations as they mirror the idea of the initial chicken drawing story, projecting that idea further into the future by aesthetical lensing.  A propagation of a focal point of visual culture that is exponential in nature.   In this example, we must also appreciate that a re-creation of a performance changes subtly from a juxtepositional work into a symmetrical one despite the originals juxtepositional stance.

            Sadly, my friend who also enjoys drawing and drafted the other chicken drawing on the bus (much better than mine I might say) did not have the good fortune of being bullied by our friend the  performance artist and so was never recognized as being the creator of exquisite chicken drawings, despite having also created chicken drawings of superior quality for most of their lives.

            The advantage of a juxtepositional artwork is that it raises questions of validity, opposition, truth, equality, justice, fairness and other political and social issues.  It also is challenging, likely requiring knowledge of the artworld and art history, as the artist creating the work likely knows something about these things and is reacting to it.  Its inherent weakness is its destructive, and oppositional stance.  The weakness of the juxtepositional work is also the symmetrical artworks strength:  We are simply used to seeing it.  When one is used to seeing something, or at least sees something a lot, we tend to grow fond of it.  Think of coffee, or the sky.  If the sky turns red, and fills with smoke, we are unhappy, and become stressed and perhaps angry.  But, we also are intellectually activated by the nature of the aberrant change. “Why is the sky red?”  is the first of a cascade of questions that would likely occur to a person, at least a person who ventured outside or checked the internet on that day.  Follow up questions such as: “Is something on fire?”, “Is there an alien invasion?”, “Where is my phone?” would eventually lead the person to a network of people or machines that would inform about cause and appropriate response.  These interactions do, however, lead to discussion.  Which I again argue is the whole point of contemporary art.

            All of my current work, despite its disparate forms is about this idea, and how to use this idea to confront the dialogue of art and culture so that it becomes more aware of its structures, bias, and historical context.  

            A word on art from outside the art world.  Juxtepositional art that is uninformed shall be termed:  “Coincidental Juxteposition” it might be intriguing but by accident.  One might ask why this matters.  It doesn’t, except that some people need to make a living from not accidents.