Posted on Sunday, 6 May
While one of the oddities of the participatory nature of mine and many other exhibitions is that the only participants that can possibly contribute to it are, in effect, in one place, that simply isn’t true of modern westerners, and especially, Las Vegans. They’re dispersed everywhere, and so what information, disinformation, facts, and nonsense they have to contribute get left out of the official record because of the very displacement that I’ve been studying.
But, I have a solution. While the Dictionary of Displaced Names is fixed in one physical location for the next week, its preface—which is also my thesis paper—isn’t. ”A Past Rewritten” is collaboratively live-editable at displacednames.com, so whenever you add or remove something to the story, the copy in the gallery displayed as wall-text gets updated as well. You could also just read the text from wherever you are, too, I guess, but how many of us got through a textbook without leaving some mark of ourselves on it as a message to those who might get that copy later?
One last thing: be sure that you have a recent version of Safari (desktop or mobile) or Firefox, or a slightly-less recent version of Chrome (beta and dev are using a version of WebKit that has depreciated the mechanism for checking new edits into and out from the server). After you visit, wait a few seconds for the first refresh from the server, and then click anywhere to start editing. When you or someone else checks in a change, the horizontal text box flashes a yellow outline.
Posted on Sunday, 15 April
Las Vegas’ story, perhaps unsurprisingly, begins with a foreclosed house. From it came two towns, both called Las Vegas. Hardly anyone remembers the first Las Vegas anymore, wiped away in drought and arson, and fewer still realize how much thought initially went into shaping the second into the opposite of what Las Vegas has come to mean in the place-name lexicon. Perhaps, then, this is why the city became what it is now: so absorbed with the notion of forgetting as to literally advertise itself as an lawless, unrecordable netherworld that must be forgotten.
But, I grew up there. Lots of people have. Las Vegas isn’t just some round-the-clock bacchanalia concluding with a mandatory memory wipe at the airport—it was also for twenty years the fastest growing city in the United States and a home to millions during its century in existence, even if the obsession with implosions and a parallel push for expansion have replaced much of the historic fabric of the city with fenced vacant lots. If those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, perhaps that’s why the narratives with which the town began—foreclosure, premature abandonment, an unwinnable fight against the desert itself, and communal destruction—keep following the city from where little else of its past can be found.
Places of value can be recovered, though, from the memories of those who haven’t yet forgotten what their home meant to them. Displaced from my home town, I’ve spent the past year between there and here ensconced in memory, in search of what history can be salvaged from the scraps of urban fabric, diffusing the spectacles of implosive destruction, and monumenting it all in the city’s dust itself.
Several times in the past year, I’ve mentioned that I’m writing a dictionary of the city—not just about it, but describing it in form and experience. Most of you (rightfully) thought I was insane, but yet, I have done it. What’s more, I’ll be retracing it in graphite live for two weeks in the gallery, from 10am to 5pm weekdays, because just writing a dictionary is not itself crazy enough—I had to make it a self-destructive spectacle, too. Those who come to see it, who will surely bring something lost from the city everyone seems to know with them, can pick up pencils too and contribute to, correct, corrupt, or just read from the growing, fragile index of places not left behind in Las Vegas.
Join me, April 30th through May 10th in PSU’s Art Building and, by proxy, at historic place
#87001892, for a look at a city always shifting into dust in Book of Sand.
We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future. If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.
Posted on Wednesday, 7 March
A place can be peopled by ghosts more real than living inhabitants.
Posted on Sunday, 19 February
Lucy Lippard, “Sweet Home”
Posted on Monday, 23 January
150. Oh dear. I think I may have actually written a book.
Day 2
Posted on Tuesday, 25 October
As my sand house, along with the rest of the show, prepares to be stricken, I was reminded of something I wrote in the haze of morning on the third day of installation. By reminded, I of course mean that I found it in my Google Docs list and had no memory of how it got there. I present it here unedited, unredacted, and unable to explain the 6 hour gap.
Hour 1
Last night was extremely productive, although any objective measure would not bear out that opinion. I am outside early—at 6:00 A.M.—to let in Will and Sam to the gallery. The sun is not risen and indeed, the vacancy in the Starbucks reminds me that this is not a city that values the early-riser. The red-shirted girl in the corner, who comprises the entirety of the store’s patronage, scowls at me as I enter. I have interrupted her private space, the hour she owns. I think of how often I am her, order my tea, and leave for the gallery.
Hour 2
Sam has arrived and is drilling futilely into the spraycreted walls disguising the hard, unforgiving cinderblock at the core of the building. Brutalism is many things, with resistance to change, movement, or alteration key among them, and so the drilling is futile. The walls I form on the ground in sand feel as loose as the real walls of the forgotten Victorian house would have been compared to these. The whir of the drill, somehow, is a respite to the senses from that of the hideous gasp of the air conditioning as I parse out which lines are worth making only to see them destroyed by the further installation progress of others. But they’ll all be destroyed eventually, so why parse?
Hour 8
Sometime in the past hour, the athletic push I envisioned having for this spare time between the other artists’ installations transformed into a show gratuitous self-mutilation for gawkers on the skybridge. I am now Chris Burden, crawling on a bed of glass for a T.V. commercial, dreaming of a time still to come when I can simply hire people to make neon signs for me.1
Hour 10
Sam has returned with his father to finish his video’s installation. Somehow beyond my comprehension, I finish before he does. It is a hollow victory. I may not have kneecaps anymore and there are probably a lot of pictures of me crouching next to the hobby horse’s package going onto people’s Facebook walls tonight. At least I will not be smiling in them.
Hour 11
Again I am alone with my broom and dustpan, removing dust that is my own and dust that isn’t. I realize I could use the remaining interval to shoot pictures and, for the first time since 6:45 this morning, set foot outside of Neuberger Hall. Music plays from the roof of the sports building for some reason and I am reminded that there is a life outside of that space—real, vibrant, exciting, and youthful. This is not a happy realization, as the pain in my joints and head and heart tell me I am none of these things anymore. Soon I will return to my terrarium, pretending to make accessible places I can no longer get to.
Hour 12
I have sat. That this is a milestone should demonstrate how badly it felt to actually accomplish it. I slipped off one of the rungs of the ladder to adjust the vinyl on the window before I realized that lifting my legs was a challenge, as was standing, as was, increasingly, moving at all. With repair work from my mishap on the line done, I feel as if I am going to leave soon: either from Neuberger Hall or my physical form. I am flimsier than my sand-lined walls now.
Hour 13
I am at the place I have been calling my home to make myself feel better about being away from it—and no, I do not mean the gallerist’s closet in the Autzen, curled into the fetal position to die clutching the door key like the Ring of Sauron. That key is gone now and I am happier for it, although not by much. I had to groan loudly to contort my broken body into the proper zig-zag shape for sitting in a chair, and I think I put off the three simultaneous parties in earshot of my room because of it. No matter. They will become like me someday, although not quite so soon or so explicitly self-inflicted.
- You may think I am mistakenly referring to another artist by the name of Bruce Nauman in this second portion, who has both created surely-painful performance works as well as the commissioning of neon from the noble gas furnaces of professional neonsmiths. I think we can both agree that you are correct in as much as Chris Burden has not done anything I can now recall with neon as it’s primary component. However, where you are mistaken is in assuming that Bruce Nauman is a real person, rather than a decades-old pseudonym of Chris Burden, adopted so as to allow him to continue performing (with significant plastic surgery) as he aged while also making obscenely intricate and expensive kinetic sculptures. Before you dismiss this as me desperately trying to spin a mistake I have somehow left here unaddressed for, like, two months, ask yourself: have you ever seen them in a room together? And doesn’t Chris Burden look an awful lot like Bruce Nauman with thick black plastic glasses? ↩
Posted on Saturday, 15 October
Neuberger Hall Directory, 1889–present
![Even the most settled of us in the West are tourists, quick to relocate and forget, and even more quickly forgotten. Our ingrained mobility has stunted the development of communities with long term bonds to people and places—as Wallace Stegner puts it, “robbed us of the gods who make places holy.” Our temporary residencies have reduced our surrounds to chronologically inseparable and identical motel blocks, and to lose and forget one makes no impression on the next set of guests who won’t know it was ever different.
The Autzen’s corner of block 199 is no exception. The house that stood here for 70 years is today reduced to a picture in a hallway to pass by, a strange Victorian thing that doesn’t make sense. The few clapboard homes and brick apartments like it that remain are indistinguishable filler for the alleyways between the cast concrete walls, no older or more significant than the rest of the landscape. To a person walking down Broadway, the cast concrete and glass walls seem so permanent, but eternally so. They will always will be, and always were. That house couldn’t exist here, because we can’t let go of the freeway and the college and the things particular to our experiences that could be leveled as easily as that house was in 1966. It may be, as Stegner writes, “impossible to be unconscious of or indifferent to space” for Westerners. How often, though, are we conscious upon entering this space that its footprint is the size of a home, or that countless other lost places are tucked just beneath us as we walk through these halls?
The house has eroded from this plot of land, and its memory has eroded from our sense of this neighborhood. What’s left of a place whose photographs and other artifacts lack broad significance enough to be cherished and saved into archives? Our present means of entry to its existence, however flawed, are halted and the place shifted even further from possibility. How could it have mattered to anyone if they never photographed it, we wonder, and decide it isn’t deserving of our remembrance as well. And, because of it, our ability to empathize with the fact that seeming perpetuity of the ground we stand on too will be interrupted and our equally nomadic successors will be unable to comprehend our lives and our connection with this place. The last ghostly outlines of our predecessors’ lives are scattered away with the swing of our boot as we walk through, and without a continuity of people and places to settle new visitors, no one that follows us would know it had ever been any different. The lines in sand are a means to entry to the little house every bit as flawed as a photograph or bronze plaque, but whose ease of erasure I hope illustrates how lossy remembrance can be over time and between visitors.
As Robert Smithson noted of his non-sites, “the [gallery’s] room reminds us of the limitations of our condition,” but that is not entirely the case here. The house within this room reminds us of the limitations of our positioning within causal time—for what few steps we can take into the house are through the demarcations of the walls, crumbling and scattering a place that is already dust. It also reminds us of the scale of the gallery’s present space, large enough to fit nearly the entire contents of the home of dozens of people over seven decades.
Stegner writes of “every city’s edge” as being the divide between civic life and the endless, timeless arid stretches that make up most of the West, the sunset into which the wandering hero always rides. But time complicates boundaries like this because the edges are everywhere, unevenly shorn and layered throughout its stream; the edge of a city is at any moment at any place within it waiting to be forgotten—waiting for the places we find holy to be scattered and swept away.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lt4uzsK6101qdlhpqo1_1280.jpg)
Posted on Saturday, 15 October
Even the most settled of us in the West are tourists, quick to relocate and forget, and even more quickly forgotten. Our ingrained mobility has stunted the development of communities with long term bonds to people and places—as Wallace Stegner puts it, “robbed us of the gods who make places holy.” Our temporary residencies have reduced our surrounds to chronologically inseparable and identical motel blocks, and to lose and forget one makes no impression on the next set of guests who won’t know it was ever different.
The Autzen’s corner of block 199 is no exception. The house that stood here for 70 years is today reduced to a picture in a hallway to pass by, a strange Victorian thing that doesn’t make sense. The few clapboard homes and brick apartments like it that remain are indistinguishable filler for the alleyways between the cast concrete walls, no older or more significant than the rest of the landscape. To a person walking down Broadway, the cast concrete and glass walls seem so permanent, but eternally so. They will always will be, and always were. That house couldn’t exist here, because we can’t let go of the freeway and the college and the things particular to our experiences that could be leveled as easily as that house was in 1966. It may be, as Stegner writes, “impossible to be unconscious of or indifferent to space” for Westerners. How often, though, are we conscious upon entering this space that its footprint is the size of a home, or that countless other lost places are tucked just beneath us as we walk through these halls?
The house has eroded from this plot of land, and its memory has eroded from our sense of this neighborhood. What’s left of a place whose photographs and other artifacts lack broad significance enough to be cherished and saved into archives? Our present means of entry to its existence, however flawed, are halted and the place shifted even further from possibility. How could it have mattered to anyone if they never photographed it, we wonder, and decide it isn’t deserving of our remembrance as well. And, because of it, our ability to empathize with the fact that seeming perpetuity of the ground we stand on too will be interrupted and our equally nomadic successors will be unable to comprehend our lives and our connection with this place. The last ghostly outlines of our predecessors’ lives are scattered away with the swing of our boot as we walk through, and without a continuity of people and places to settle new visitors, no one that follows us would know it had ever been any different. The lines in sand are a means to entry to the little house every bit as flawed as a photograph or bronze plaque, but whose ease of erasure I hope illustrates how lossy remembrance can be over time and between visitors.
As Robert Smithson noted of his non-sites, “the [gallery’s] room reminds us of the limitations of our condition,” but that is not entirely the case here. The house within this room reminds us of the limitations of our positioning within causal time—for what few steps we can take into the house are through the demarcations of the walls, crumbling and scattering a place that is already dust. It also reminds us of the scale of the gallery’s present space, large enough to fit nearly the entire contents of the home of dozens of people over seven decades.
Stegner writes of “every city’s edge” as being the divide between civic life and the endless, timeless arid stretches that make up most of the West, the sunset into which the wandering hero always rides. But time complicates boundaries like this because the edges are everywhere, unevenly shorn and layered throughout its stream; the edge of a city is at any moment at any place within it waiting to be forgotten—waiting for the places we find holy to be scattered and swept away.
Posted on Tuesday, 20 September
The poster I got to make for the fall show in the Autzen isn’t really a piece in the show, but then, it kind of is. Even more than I thought it was when I made it, in fact.
The show, on the temporariness of history and community in the West, needed a poster that clearly evidenced the change it argued was happening in an environment that was familiar, and the abrupt changes to the exhibition space’s area—transitioning from a suburb to a blighted part of downtown to a mostly brutalist university campus—were ideally suited for it. Maps themselves are interesting in this regard not only because they are terribly ethereal to begin with because of their obsession with accuracy, but also because their primary representational medium has shifted so greatly in the past two decades that the way they used to be viewed hardly exists at all anymore. Heck, the way we view maps online has changed abruptly about five times since the internet came into being—anyone remember Mapquest?
One thing I hadn’t expected in the design, though, was how temporary the stasis point I picked was. The day we got the posters back from printing, Google Maps’ place-markers lost their solid black outlines for a subtler darkened outline for the first time since the Google Local service was introduced in 2006. Of course, the accidental comment of the temporariness of what we recognize as stable changing between the time a poster is sent to press and is posted to promote a show—or the time between when we see something we recognize and check again to find it’s been altered, replaced, or removed—about how temporality affects us makes for quite a decent surprise addition.
Posted on Friday, 29 July
For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by a bench that sits kitty-corner from my apartment-ish building, the King Albert, across 11th Avenue. As the subject of a recent mixtape, I had the opportunity to introduce it to 11 people across the world, some of whom I’d never even met. While I had been content to leave it at that, the situation of my subject has now changed enough that I thought it right to share at least the liner notes that constituted its semi-global introduction on a slightly more public forum—or, I suppose, a less public forum, considering this blog has less of an audience than that mixtape did.
This album is about a park bench I’ve gotten to know since I came to Portland last year. Well, know may be the wrong word. We don’t have conversations or anything. Then again, I don’t have those with most of the people I know.
What first drew me to the bench was that it was about the only thing around—besides my own near-century-old apartment building—that wasn’t either new and shiny or fenced away: in a way, its patina matched that of my mind after two decades cooking it in my native Las Vegas sun. Several of the bench’s slats are rotten almost all the way through from a decade or so of exposure to the northwest’s constant drizzle and its paint is bubbling and peeling straight through to the rusting iron beneath, giving it the appearance of a beetle shedding a lumpy, ill-fitting skin.
What’s really interesting about the bench, though, is what it can’t do: it can’t be sat on. At all. It’s a purely conceptual piece of seating. A tether anchors it solidly to a foundation a few feet away, running beneath a fence carefully placed just under one human leg-width away.
I live across 11th Avenue from the Maryanne Apartments, which the bench faces—or, rather, faced. Today, the site of the Maryanne is a shared dumping ground for the four surrounding construction sites; abandoned, rusty fume hoods from the Science Building 2 renovation are sprinkled amongst six-wheeled trucks, homemade caliche, an office trailer, and a port-a-potty emblazoned with the surely popular phone number 1–800–TOILETS.
When the Maryanne and King Albert were built, this area was residential, commercial, active, and vibrant on the edge of downtown—the Mt. Tabor streetcar line rattled windows as it circled the block. Then the university and urban renewal came, swallowing whole blocks through condemnations; put under the charge of unmotivated students, most were allowed to decay into blight, then were torn down as such. As the historic building population has dwindled to nil, so has this place’s vitality, leaving behind only over-designed landscape spaces and, in the interim, the shabby construction yards I know too well.
My hometown, of course, the epicenter of all grubby lots, where children are just as likely to grow up believing mattresses are harvested from patches along the roadside as they would be pumpkins. We tear things down with such frothing enjoyment that even our new constructions seem fixated with becoming easier to destroy; the thought of a styrofoam façade or chickenwire-and-stucco wall outside of Las Vegas is almost laughable. But, if there is a thing we have respect for saving, it’s the home, and so the shoddily-built suburban neighborhoods of my parents’ youth continue unthreatened. Here, no such respect exists for the much more condensed urban form of the apartment house, which may hold the lives of thousands of families in its walls over a century or more.
There is another difference, though. Las Vegans are professionals in purging a space of any sense of past in the process of transforming it; when this city tries to wipe a block clean, spots remain accidentally—like the bench, still tied to the crumbled foundation of the Maryanne beneath all those parked trucks and trailers, a memento mori of the homes that once stood here and the lives lived in them. This bench’s history, and the neighborhood’s, is now defined by the act of some anonymous contractor who set up the fence both on top of the cable and so close to the bench that to merely sit in it becomes an impossibility.
In fairness, as you may have realized by now, this isn’t just a portrait of a bench; it’s about the displaced, those away from home. We can anchor ourselves to our homes with memory, and so can take them with us wherever we are; we miss them, love them, and revisit them at will, even when we’re 700 miles away staring past a bench in the rain at a construction site as desolate as the end of the world—even when what we left is impossible to return to. So, then, let this be a message of hope for those who can stare into the forest green privacy mesh and through it still see glimpses of the place they are anchored to, even when those places are far away and gone.
The bench, as it stood when I wrote this, didn’t seem to have a future. Though the project across from me is finishing, the possibility of Facilities returning the construction lot where the Maryanne stood seemed less than likely. Today, they carted off the office trailer that’s sat in it for the past year or so, just as the grass seed in the ajacent yard has begun to sprout. The impossible bench may soon be a bit more possible after all.
Of passing interest to the general public: the Graduate Project Proposal
Posted on Friday, 20 May
My attraction to matters of the past comes from Las Vegas, where history is treated not with reverence but scorn. There it is a burdensome blockage to an ever-changing vision of the future which itself is easily discarded by the next generation as were the things it replaced. Portland, though, has a patchwork of history that is sometimes preserved but often ignored or forgotten. Previously this year, I have framed mine as an exploration of monuments; the monument, and indeed any structure that finds itself in a public or semi-public space, is often in a state of flux, both remembered and forgotten, valued and present but ignored; that is the state of history that I am compelled by, and it is greatly present here.
Apartment houses, as I have used as a testing ground for experimentation over the previous year and will into the next, are key spaces for this. Records about them are sporadically kept and selectively remembered; but, they are also home to many simultaneous narrative threads. King Albert’s story is of a once-great building that is the last of its era, surviving through the dismantling of the residential character of the university district, the loss of independence in student living here from the university, and the processes by which an institution can forget or willingly ignore the loss of great swaths of time in remembering a place; however, as I’ve explored in the “Resident of the Month” series and bronzed Shoefiti monument, each of the people who have lived within its walls has a story of their own to contribute to the understanding of its whole history.
The process of constructing monuments—both physically and material constructions, but also through the rhetorical means, is coming to define my work. Before I considered myself an artist, I wrote; the reintegration of language into work this year has proved compelling to me. This area is rife for continued exploration.
Any study of history, especially on the scale which interests me, has the necessary prerequisite of intensive research. During the course of this year that passionate quest for research has shown itself to me as a compelling ground not just for knowledge but for dialogue on its own, and I will strive to further explore ways to visualize, clarify, and integrate the processes of historical investigative aggregation into my work. I have also made steps to begin dialogues with archival institutions directly, as well as with individuals to gain an understanding of their need for on-the-fly historicization.
As T. Cuyler Young, Jr. notes, facts only become history after a researcher “picks up those facts and uses them.” Mine then is going forward a process of making history as art. Through humor and subtle exchanges with a public, I wish to continue to relate the less common stories of targeted local history through to the present, a process which I am excited at the prospect of continuing in the coming school year.
"The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything"
Posted on Tuesday, 19 April
Linda Holmes, of NPR’s Monkey See blog, wrote a phenomenal piece that speaks not just those who realize they can never read everything but a fraction of a fraction of the greatest works that will ever be produced, but those students of history who try to do the same with knowledge.
I see people culling by category, broadly and aggressively: television is not important, popular fiction is not important, blockbuster movies are not important. Don’t talk about rap; it’s not important. Don’t talk about anyone famous; it isn’t important. And by the way, don’t tell me it is important, because that would mean I’m ignoring something important, and that’s … uncomfortable. That’s surrender.
It’s an effort, I think, to make the world smaller and easier to manage, to make the awareness of what we’re missing less painful. There are people who choose not to watch television – and plenty of people don’t, and good for them – who find it easier to declare that they don’t watch television because there is no good television (which is culling) than to say they choose to do other things, but acknowledge that they’re missing out onMad Men (which is surrender).
And people cull in the other direction, too, obviously, dismissing any and all art museums as dull and old-fashioned because actually learning about art is time-consuming — and admitting that you simply don’t prioritize it means you might be missing out. (Hint: You are.)
Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That’s the moment you realize you’re separated from so much. That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love.
Architecture as fraud as improvement
Posted on Tuesday, 8 February
While I don’t often write about the events of the PMMNLS, Deborah Stratman’s lecture yesterday deserves an exception. The installations and site investigations that she spent the bulk of the night discussing were compelling and gratifying, particularly the rogue, migratory parking attendant booth she created in conjunction with Temporary Services; she repeatedly referred to the notion behind this project as being one of “architecture as fraud”. Given that my own work—both previously and in future—is concerned with the issue of the fraudulent, the makeshift, or the appropriated being more effective in achieving results than can be accomplished through official means, I was thoroughly fascinated.
This evening, I’ve had that same notion confirmed again. Gizmodo writer Kyle VanHemert notes that the city of Cranston, Rhode Island recently discovered that someone, over the period of what appears to be several decades, added 652 rogue, undocumented, and unapproved stop signs to city roadways—making nearly 25% percent of the signs in Cranston unofficial.
While that itself is intriguing, I’m more pleased to learn that Cranston is choosing not to ignore the actions of the person who placed them, but instead to learn from those actions by leaving all but 21 of them in place as official, legal, and newly legitimate signage.
I can’t help but imagine how many lives have been improved or saved in the decades since these signs went into place, and how much time, money, and effort the person who performed these acts saved the city of Cranston; architecture as fraud itself is one thing, but fraud as improvement (or, perhaps more specifically, architecture as fraud as amelioration) is another level worth further exploration.
It’s a tremendous story of the success of the outside entity in facilitating change for the public good, and illegitimate actions triumphing over incontrovertible, systematic failings.
And, for the record, neither I nor Deborah seem to have ever been to Cranston, so this is one that can’t be pinned on us. Or, at least, on me.
Posted on Monday, 31 January
Nick van Woert, as quoted by Sympathy for the Art Gallery (originally via ArtInfo):
In the course of reading about the Etruscans and Romans, he came upon the haruspex, a diviner of ancient Italy. The Etruscans, Van Woert explains, “would find a site they were interested in for a new camp or city or whatever, and the haruspex would go there, find some animals from the area, cut them up, dissect them, and analyze their guts. He would see a direct relationship between the health of an animal’s guts and the health of the land it was found on, which is badass, because it’s totally empirical and almost quantifiable.
“For my piece, I took a Classical figure, broke him in half, and then built his guts out of material I found outside the studio: gravel, broken bottles, energy drinks, flies, all sorts of things. I like the idea of the guts of the figure being a mirror of the environment in which it was made. So I’ve been working on permutations of that idea.”
From the Classical casts Van Woert uses, one can, he feels, divine the state of our society. “If you take the whole lineage of figurative sculpture back to the beginning, you’ll see a progression of ideas. And I think you can read in them our priorities, our attitudes toward nature, toward material. Take these casts. At one time they were done in bronze or marble, which shows a certain attitude toward longevity and production. Now they’re just façades of who we were; they reference the past, but they’re made out of fiberglass, this cheap mass-produced stuff. So I like how they reach back yet reflect who we are now.”
Posted on Friday, 28 January
Imagine this, but smaller, then bigger. And, Portlandier. That is what is in store for critique next week.
