In my digital work, it seems I have a hyper-formalist streak, but one which is connected to abstraction, say, in the way Thomas Struth's work is in something like this:
I like when natural, or actual things are 'lensed' as abstraction, because in a sense there is a collapsing of a whole literature of the grotesque into something like that, materiality approached as abstraction puts on the lensing of a sort of Deleuzian schiztophrenia, or really something closer to the word for a snail's eye, schitzopodal, but with the p replaced by an m to make schitzomodal, pushing a categorical multi-stability
to the foreground. Just nod if you understand. :) Now I don't do work like Struth's because I don't have the photographic chops to do that, but it is what I often like to see, or at least I can identify with the subject matter, as it seems useful, and by that I mean that it elicits a certain epistemological freshness, some sense of revivification, or even an archaeological mode, an archaeology of the present which is already a huge cliche'
but nonetheless, National Geographic is still in business.
Now in writing, I like wonkier, less monolithic things, sad scribbles, oddities, cartoons, notations, dullness, weirdness, a loucheness. But also, as always, a kind of romanticism of saturation. I can see the stupidest, content-wise, apparition, and if the color is sufficiently gaudy or saturated, I'm ready to give over my entire soul to it, or if not that, I'm drawn into minutely describing just what such and such a texture or chromaticism I think I'm seeing, a louche guacheness, a stolid oilific, a rubberness, a minerality, metallicism, etc.. We've all seen weird little boys with eyes like this. I have a big green leather chair, but this one looks like
olive velvet.
I don't think I've ever had a blue turtleneck.
The question of style and color and content, and psychology came up yesterday again while I was watching a free little film on netflix called _Sunday Bloody Sunday_ the 1971 John Schlesinger film. There are some great moments, visually in the film, a scene where Wanda Jackson and Murray Head are having a row, and then Wanda is watching him shower through the shower curtain, and what is presented is the cinematic version of a moving abstraction, and this could be gone deeper into, though its more or less cliche', but it's the kind of cliche' one wants while pausing between folding clothes and washing dishes, you know, and then after that, Wanda sort of remembers why she loves the guy and she embraces him, but camera goes onto her big
sort of meaty and mottled hands, very Alice Neel like. The hands are not pretty, they're real, but, their realness is sort of abstract. Is it the color? Is it the scale? Is it me? I don't generally like women with big hands, or at least they don't really interest me physically. Is seeing these big hands in a moment of emotional catharsis somehow transferring? Well, It's a great scene. It's actually doing something artistic.
Yesterday I had to drive across Dallas 3 times because I kept forgetting my new house keys in the townhome, so each time I came back I picked up another box of books. The wall of bookcases is filling up,
and yesterday, I laid out a cheap but beautiful Turkish wool folk rug made by god knows who, or how, but the thing looks great all by its lonesome, makes you almost just want to live on a collection of oriental rugs,
with maybe just a little pallette and an opium pipe. sit around with a little saw
and mangle toy model kits of cars and boats and planes
and rebuild them into weird wall hangings and paint them.
And to have little stickers made like the ones for the insignia of planes, but have them be actual pan-asian weaving motifs, little rug icons, so that the whole thing's
like the explosion of a flying-carpet assemblage mapped onto
some other memory assemblage, and the whole thing
transferring, and going through transferances, micropoliticalities,
macropoliticallow-teasings, etc..
skitzophriendias, etc..
queer cousins in art.
