Freedom through Work Generated Limits

Part I – Introduction
Part II – Individual Research Activity
Part III – Collaborative Project
Part IV – Teaching Strategies
Part V – Discussion of Andrea Zittel
Part VI – Conclusions


Part I  Introduction

    My interest in the generative capacity of limitation has roots in my proclivity towards a philosophical and cognitive approach to relating to the world. One can see limitations, especially in the context of rule-making and defining, repeatedly employed as the starting point for creative, exploratory, and demonstrative epistemological practices in philosophical texts (with exhortations to assume premises) as well as in more formalized versions throughout science and mathematics.  Euclid’s Elements creates a universe from its genesis in explicit definitions, postulates, and common notions.  These rules, or limits, generate propositions resulting in an outcome either done or demonstrated (Q.E.F or Q.E.D). More recently, I encountered a quote from Richard Serra, which has remained in paraphrase in my mind since: “work comes from work”.  The conjunction of these two ideas, one, rule-making, or limitation and, two, working/focus on process, suggests a methodological framework for a creative praxis model.
    Although the intuition of the importance of these two principles happened separately, their implicit connection became apparent in my work this semester.  Work, in both its noun and verb form, becomes it’s own kind of definition, law, rule, or limit. In doing, one seems to be engaged in the reconciliation of parts, the making commensurate. One way of reconciling is via a third entity, with a ruler, some standard or equalizing agent. In the most basic sense, there are material and physical constraints, perhaps the broadest sense would be imaginative constraints, or, in other words, the ones we’re not aware of.
    The conscious combination of these two ideas provides both a starting place and a process for the development and elaboration of ideas and projects. I created some rules to test and implement over the past four months, which would combine a playful experimental approach with a narrow focus and self-imposed limits. There were three types of rule-making at work that I applied to ongoing projects based on ideas generated in previous work.   The first form of rule-making was creating a set of four premises, formalized in the style of Euclidean postulates, that I would explore and express visually, conceptually, and in the construction practices of my work:
    1. Reality is both created and creative.
    2. Reality is relational.
    3. Reality is incremental.
    4. Reality is idea, inextricable from elaborate specificity and embedded.
The second kind of rule-making was prescriptive: I would keep a notebook to write down ideas as they occurred while working. Finally, I adopted external, practical constraints into my practice.  My final project had the twofold limits of collaboration and site-specificity.
    As a correlate to my rule-based activity, I used the work of other rule-making artists to understand and refine my own ideas and conclusions about my praxis model, most topically, Andrea Zittel.

Part II Individual Research Activity - (see images)

Originally, I imagined generating a set of somewhat arbitrary concerns or constraints, which might be useful as a starting point or educational exercise, this turned out to be distracting and not complementary to ongoing engagement in specific projects.  This was a discovery that complements the premise that the work itself, whether seemingly the ideas or the materials, generates it’s own set of limits, hence work comes from work.  Another observation from cataloging ideas is that in addition to new ideas being generated, they, reciprocally, inform the work being actualized. For example, my new ideas elucidate a focal area of concern that might not have been apparent if left impacted in one project. This helps the decision making within the project in progress. The remainder of this section lists the projects that served as the starting points or the limit-generating-work, and the ideas that came from them. I have also included some forays into material experimentation with some of the new ideas.

Starting Points:
1. Finery Beds (New title upon completion: There’s No Place Like Home. You Can Never Return Home.)
2. Finery wall-mounted sculpture in color: yellow (New title upon completetion: Bedding Index)
3. Finery wall-mounted sculpture in color: grey
4. Spring Street Co shows
5. Freese’s Installation

Generated Ideas:
1. Pieced fabric in traditional Log Cabin pattern, but using bias seams so there is no “staircase” effect.
2. Explore the question, “How much does a quilt weigh?”
3. Embed objects in plastic; use plastic to “quilt” materials together or unify strata: (see image)
     a. cheese
     b. quilt
     c. toothbrush
     d. photo of masonic hall
4. “Test of Time” series  - explore the conventional implications of this measure (see image)
    a. counting
    b. same things repeated over more time/space
5. Maine Crafts Guild show 2009
    a. Functional quilt, log cabin pattern made w/ canvas
    b. Functional quilt, log cabin pattern made w/ sateen
    c. Functional quilt, log cabin pattern made w/ muslin
    d. Functional quilt, log cabin pattern made w/ wool
    e. 2 booths, 1 w/ functional pieces, 1 w/ Finery series
6. Explore layers and strata of fabric as translations from front to back.  What change takes place in the middle?  How does that changes happen?  In how many steps/layers?
7. Switch Focus Series: Still lives?  Photography?  Explore the boundaries of objects by focusing on unconventional definition of mundane objects and spaces.  
    a. split objects in half and recombine them
    b. photograph a space by cutting off the traditional focal points to reframe an in-between space
    c. create new objects by conjoining the things that traditionally go together
         1.) chairfloor
        2.) deskstapler
        3.) pencilpaper
        4.) clotheshanger
8. Pattern House:  Build or rehab small house to explore the integration of objects and pattern on living and in functional environments.  From decorative patterns to patterns of behavior to the way that environments spring from and cause habits and repetition.  Every surface would be elaborate and modular (tile, quilts, wood planking, patterned fabric, patterned painted surfaces), but the house would be only functional objects.  In other words, nothing that can not be used to fulfill some task fairly directly associated with physical living such as eating, sleeping, communication, waste removal.  No paintings or sculptures.  Only enough dishes for the number of people who live there.  One knife, one cutting board, one pot.  Functional items should be accessible and visible: no closet doors, no cabinet doors.  Everything should be simultaneously simple and efficient and elaborate.
9.  Home Catalog:  Tag every object in my house and create a database of content for those objects. Discard objects without appropriate grounds for existing in house.  Website?  Traditional card catalog?  What kinds of information should be analyzed:  a. sentimental/historical/narrative significance b. functionality c. material composition  D. efficiency/redundancy
10. Pieced sculpture to correspond with musical rhythms.  Use special interpretation of the temporal experiences that resonate most with me by organizing my musical tastes into rhythmic similarity and interpreting that in terms of the special organization of materials.  Songs include:  This Must Be The Place, Niggas Wanna Act, I’m Good-I’m Gone
11. Finery Series:  Use the back of the sateen as an alternate texture
12. Finery Series:  Dye sateen; using tea? Solar dyes?  Other food sources? (see images)
13.  Explore the physical implications of time as space by working explicitly with change over area, using pieced fabric
14. Sculpture:  make a pieced sculpture that extends further into three dimensional space than a traditional quilt.  It should be free-standing and not attached to a wall
15.  Installation:  using the same pieced and layered formula, expand the spaces between the component parts in such a way that the interior can be navigated by a person, in a similar way as riding through a car wash.  Opportunity for including light and sound.  Perhaps there should be some transition space between the outside environment and this installed space such as a hallway or series of doors.
16. Installation at warehouse in Newport using dilapidated showroom vignettes as some version or study for the pattern house
17. Collaborate on a video with Cameron using the warehouse space
18. Create a layered and pieced sculpture with the intent of expressing/exploring emotional content
19. Use nails to “quilt” layers of fabric or screening.  Some nails should face away from viewer, some towards
19. “I Judge Books By Their Covers”:  make a limited edition number of books (20?) approximately 50 pages in length where all of the pages of the book are the exact same image/text as the cover of the book; use letter press printing
    a. Islamic prayer text: Perpetual glory and increasing prosperity and triumphant victory and constant splendor and rising good fortune and wealth and happiness and well being and generosity and wealth and happiness and happiness and long life to its people.
    b. “The Constructed Wife” text
    1.)  Option #1:
Conclusion
Certain moods result in colorful splotches of paint on large stretched canvasses.
Certain moods result in garments of volute, snap-on art-discs.
Certain moods result in clean empty white rooms, penetrated by solitary shafts of bright sunlight
One mood results in constructions of violence, fierce eyes, volubility, rage.
    Another mood results in constructions of deference, shyness, equanimity, peace.
    The “hard moods” of the constructed wife fuel commerce.
    The “soft moods” are more unpredictable, poetic.
    The Constructed Wife subsists on hundreds of tons of coke and bituminous resin.
She moves slowly through the blasted expanse of terrain, inclining her body toward the city of her lovers.
    Dark birds flock to her upper extremities.
She hates “reality,” arguments from authority, government intervention, Christianity, cloying passions, the dying organic form of social mankind.
    2.) Option #2 The Myth of the Constructed Wife
The myth of the Constructed Wife is that she constructed herself at the beginning of time.
    The Constructed Wife, herself, constructed this myth of self-construction ab novo.
There is much evidence in the fossil and archeological record to suggests that immense portions of the Constructed Wife were, indeed, conscious, deliberate, self-generated.
And yet those who have journeyed deep into the interior have seen, firsthand, the immense, spectacular, unconstructed formations, gorgeous, warm, red, pulsating organic formations. . .
3.) Option #3 Mood-Nexus in the Constructed Wife
The moods of the constructed wife generate, not speech, but constructions.  
The constructions are intricate, conceptually-dense, and vary in size.  
Several different and important architectural styles are represented.  
For every internal modification there is a structural development upon the exterior to express it.  Constructions considered as “mood-emblems” of stages in the wife’s personal, iconographic life-
journey, against a cold wind, through the blasted expanse of terrain.
       c. “The Garden Party” text; no particular passages chosen yet
20.  Host installation show at warehouse about interiors/furniture
21. Traveling art show w/ Cameron.  Drive around and set up show at different host locations around country
22.  Start new business in order to compare marriage to business
23. Use The Spring Street Co as a vehicle for different performance pieces at craft shows.  Express the business as art rather than the product (quilts, pillows, etc. as art)
    a. pay what you wish at shows
    b. address issues of small vs. large scale manufacture, made in USA, etc
24. Pattern Apartment House: similar to original Pattern House idea but using several small apartments in one building to create and compare different environments in an experimental situation
25. Sculpture: display quilts on the ground
    a. is there something under them?
b. is it a quilt on the ground, in some sort of more “natural” environment, as opposed to hung on the wall – or is it some more abstract form, not immediately associated with quilt as a functional object
    c. is it a topography?
26.  Make work for a very limited audience, just Rob and Cameron.
27. Make a collection which conjures childhood sensory experiences
    a. paste/perfume
    b. wet chamois
    c. sound of cars passing in opposite directions
28. Dramaturgy experiment: set up rules for Cameron living in apartment based mostly on material objects that must be used
29.  Create an outdoor installation that is only for night viewing and is large enough that it can’t be completely perceived by the light of a flashlight.
30. Inside/Outside video piece about intimacy with objects: laundry, cooking, eating, tea, cosmetics (lotion, nail clipping) Things that dissolve.
31. Sculpture that is consciously creating cognitive documents
32. Expand a finery sculpture into three-dimensional space so that the viewer will have to observe the interior layers obliquely
33. Wear a uniform for 1 semester
34. Create a daily and/or weekly menu for 1 semester
35.  Marriage project:  effect some form of reality through witnessing, even if the witnessing is obviously delayed in time such as filming a wedding that is not legal until the film is watched
36. Inedible Food corp. – can and sell foods marketed as inedible
37. Film human interaction with installation quilt
38.  Sounds of Cities project:  capture the distinct sounds of place, Bangor
39. Transcribe common wordless experiences: falling asleep, memory, dreams
40. Title:  I Want To Tell You The Truth.  I Want To Tell You The Truth.
41.  What is actually in my imagination?  Can I build my way to understanding my own self-generated images?
42. Teaching as Performance:  the concerns of teaching and art seem to overlap if not coincide.  It is ultimately a task of communication in the service of a search/creation of meaning or further creation.  To what extent can we or should we convey information?  Is the underpinning of any information confidence and engagement, interest?  Questioning?  
    a. explore performance in work such as the dramaturgy project and wearing a uniform
    b. research performance history
    c. research educational theory
    d. work with Amy in classroom setting: Amy teaches, I perform
43. Family Aphorism:
    a. fork is lighter than the needle
    b. if you’re hungry you’ll eat anything
    c. the ass follows the legs
    d. death must be good because no one ever comes back
    e. when you go to the dance, you dance
44. Integrity piece:  quilt folded, pieced side in
45. A series of anti-Darwin, “mouse-traps” for people.  Create mechanisms which lure based on, generally considered, positive attributes.

46. "Macaroni necklace project": Make quilts as gifts for specific people throughout semester and give them away.

Part III Collaborative Project (see images of Freese's building)

    For my final project, I decided to work on a collaborative, site-specific piece in the former Freese’s department store building in downtown Bangor. After looking at photographs of the space we narrowed down areas of the building that seemed most appealing and met to talk about possible approaches and general aesthetic inclinations.  We referred to other artists and artworks to better articulate ideas about what kinds of work we found appealing generally and what kinds of work we thought were applicable to the approaches we envisioned for the Freese’s project. We were able to come up with some general ideas:
1. deal with the building as a formal presence, respond organically
2. consider the integrity of the space, content, and memory
3. ghosts, monuments
4. manipulate the space to create areas of more and less density
5. create a space that draws one in, like memory, or clothing racks
6. bridge the gap between the building’s current state, it’s past, and it’s past function
We decided to experiment with materials independently and then meet again. We used clothing and materials that would have been in a department store, but altered them informed by the remaining structure especially the wall we chose – part structural, part crumbling, part atrophy. During our second meeting we looked at and discussed the results of our experimentation: we had collected, painted, and plastered different clothing and other materials and experimented with some ways of hanging. We continued to look at and discuss other artists who’ve worked in similar ways or with similar materials, for ways of communicating ideas about our project:
1. Cathy de Monchaux, “Sculpture” May 2008 Vol. 27 No. 4
2. Jacob Hashimoto, Plumes and the Landscape Omnibus www.rhoffmangallery.com
3. Maura Brewer, Mound 2004, Occupation/Collaboration 2006 www.maurabrewer.com
4. Eva Hesse
5. Chen Zhen
With a clearer vision about how to create the pieces to install, we collected more clothing of the types that were most successful and met again to coat them in plaster.  At this point, we had not yet been to the site.  Our first visit to the space we began to arrange and install the pieces we’d created.  Over the course of a few more meetings at the site, we arranged, painted, re-arranged, and re-painted.  We brought in and removed display pieces. We decided we did not like the literal arrangement of clothes on display, and wanted to condense our objects back towards the wall to adhere, literally and metaphorically to the wall that was our starting point.  Despite the crumbling and disrepair, we wanted to maintain a fundamental structure that linked the now-rigid clothing with the architecture. The clothing needed to have the same status as the building. Our decision-making was made in conversation and within the parameters of our particular section of wall and the particular department store that holds particular nostalgia for many in Bangor. Our chosen limits informed, if not dictated, our choices.

Part IV Teaching Strategies

    In imagining how to present or prepare for the original assignment of teaching my methodology, I imagined a larger classroom scenario, which would afford more time and a shorter version appropriate to a short hands-on demo for our class.
    Workshop Approach/Proposal
    A methodology focusing on process, generation of ideas, and engagement with work, imbues the experience of making things with multidisciplinary relevance.  For example, in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Thomas Kuhn describes that even the progression of scientific discovery and methodology, a mode arguably antithetical to art, hinges on “ways of seeing the world”; a creative and open disposition in working and apprehending phenomena has been the historical catalyst for all scientific revolution, “transform[ing] the scientific imagination”.
    In specific, one would first imagine a list of experiments, generating limits, arbitrary and/or directed.  These ideas could range from physical and technical, for example, a pieced quilt block emphasizing texture, to more personal and metaphorical: an ugly quilt block or investigating the question “how much does a quilt weigh?” (There could be additional possibilities for imposing limits such as time and/or materials, e.g. I will work with paint, or each experiment will take an hour.)  
    Second, the experimentation would be guided by the notion that “work comes from work”. New ideas are generated and actualized, developed within a framework governed by the notion that self-ness is encountered through engagement with materials: “Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying.” –Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. While working on any given experiment, a notebook of ideas, problems, and questions will be generated and kept, and that will be as much the focus as the physical work.   New ideas will not be conflated and explored in one project, but will be isolated and explored in different “sketches”.   This way of working starts to create of body of concerns, a consciousness and clarity of thinking, and many ideas for future development and elaboration.

Short Demo
    For a fifteen minute presentation I would give the short version of the theoretical underpinnings for the approach of rule-making, and the prescription of note-taking.  I would also have a hands-on collaborative project.  The materials would include a sheet of paper with a pre-made mark and pencils.  The paper would be passed around the class with each student asked to make a subsequent mark, or continue the drawing in some way.  Each participant would have an allotted time to draw before passing the drawing to the next person and then time to note new ideas or alternatives generated, but not effected in the period of drawing.  In this way, each participant has an experience of becoming conscious of thinking while working.  He/she also experiences the limits of the materials and the collaborative structure. 

Part V Discussion of Andrea Zittel
From Paola Morsiani and Trevor Smith;  Andrea Zittel: Critical Space; Prestel 2005

    In looking at a number of different artists, it is fairly easy to understand their work as progressive, in the sense that one idea and/or material process leads them to the next, and so on.  “Work comes from work” emerges, unimpeded, as an operational rule.  The reason Andrea Zittel becomes such a useful model to consider is because of her transparent rule-setting. One gains a foothold, through consciousness, into that process of work breeding work.  This foothold gives us access to a working mechanism.  It helps to illuminate the functioning of the operation by understanding the impetus in terms of limitation.  This gives us a platform for action.  
    Andrea Zittel’s work seems to be telescopic construction of bounded spaces, ranging from the literal and physical to the aphoristic, if not moral.  In her practice with materials of the home environment and landscape, Zittel’s work engages directly with the perceived confines of her surroundings.  In a small, two-room, 200 square foot Brooklyn, NY shopfront, she developed A-Z Management and Maintenance Unit, Model 003 (1992), a portable, 60 square foot, metal and plywood living unit to analyze and address the constraints of living needs and spatial restriction.  Upon moving to a large industrial space, she tried to address the challenges of spatial management with smaller, autonomous units for heating and cooling: Prototype for A-Z Warm Chamber and Prototype A-Z for Cool Chamber (1993) pg. 41
    Zittel’s theoretical engagement with boundary resulted in her creation of a list of principles entitled “These things I know for sure”. These were published to accompany her video projection Sufficient Self at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.  Her piece explores and interprets her living/working environment on 25 desert acres in California. In this piece, as in much of her work, she interprets and explores the context of her environment as a structure that informs the activity there.  Her principled manifesto comes from the expansiveness and slowed pacing of the desert environment.  pg. 20-21
    Zittel’s dialectic between limitations (and types of limitations) gives her a way to find the parameters of a physical, cultural, and theoretical space and consequently to challenge conventional limitation with a personal, flexible and generative vision. Enclosed just within Zittel’s list of principles, is a microcosm of the telescopic impression of her endeavor.  Her principles range from specific and concrete observations about the care and maintenance of one’s home to reflexive statements on rule-making itself: “The creation of rules is more creative than the destruction of them. Creation demands a higher level of reasoning and draws connections between cause and effect. The best rules are never stable or permanent, but evolve naturally according to context of need.” pg. 14

Part VI Conclusions

Setting rules and limitations on the theoretical and practical level contributes to a productive praxis methodology, but generates it’s own set of questions. Why is freedom important in creative practice? How is freedom related to creative activity? How and when should one back out of a framework of self-generated postulates?  When do we question our premises?  Andrea Zittel suggests that when we create the rules ourselves we’re then free to break them and we break them when they’re not working.  It seems often, and historically prevalent, that it is difficult to tell when something is not working.  Perhaps the Mark Doty quote (in Part IV Teaching Strategies) is particularly instructive in positing the self as the ultimate limit, and one that is by it’s nature always in flux, so that our rules are always trying to bring us closer to making sense of what we see, and we are ultimately what we see.  We become the rules that generate the universe. And not unlike the effect that listing ideas has on the work that generated them, the generations change the rules themselves. There is reciprocity.

There isn’t a control group to understand freedom outside of limits.

Experiments and Demonstrations: The idea of working by balancing the tension between investigation and demonstration is applicable to all fields and seems to be directly accessed through creative-aesthetic practices, which relies on an ability to look actively and to manifest ideas in reality; in the words of Friedrich Schiller in his letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, “[The artist] strives to produce the ideal out of the union of what is possible with what is necessary.”

As a final note, I find it interesting to consider the talk given by Randy Regier specifically regarding the idea of permission to play.  He seems to be articulating these same ideas of freedom within a structure.  He didn’t elaborate on his ideas about permission, but unlike Andrea Zittel who prescribes an individualized approach to rule making, Regier seems to suggest an externalized structure for the universe within which to play.  Perhaps some of the fragility he senses is because the permission seems to come from without, unlike Zittel, who knows for sure “ . . . if you can’t change a situation, you just have to change the way that you think about the situation.”

Final Project Update:

    I started the semester with the idea that I wanted to research and develop a creative praxis model based on two principles: 1. Freedom through Limits 2. Work comes from Work. The combination of these two elements provides both a starting place and a process for the development and elaboration of ideas and discrete projects. Combining a playful experimental approach with a narrow focus and self-imposed limits will generate new possibilities.
    Experiments and Demonstrations: The idea of working by balancing the tension between exploration and demonstration is applicable to all fields and seems to be directly accessed through creative-aesthetic practices, which relies on an ability to look actively and to manifest ideas in reality; in the words of Friedrich Schiller in his letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, “[The artist] strives to produce the ideal out of the union of what is possible with what is necessary.” A methodology focusing on process, generation of ideas, and engagement with work, imbues the experience of making things with multidisciplinary relevance.  For example, in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Thomas Kuhn describes that even the progression of scientific discovery and methodology, a mode arguably antithetical to art, hinges on “ways of seeing the world”;  a creative and open disposition in working and apprehending  phenomena has been the historical catalyst for all scientific revolution, “transform[ing] the scientific imagination”.
    Specifically, I’ve been keeping a journal throughout the semester, especially in conjunction with the work I’ve been doing for NMD 570, of ideas generated while working.  Although originally I imagined generating a set of somewhat arbitrary concerns or constraints, which might be useful as a starting point or educational exercise, this turned out to be distracting and not complementary to ongoing engagement in specific projects.  This fact actually works well with the idea that the work itself, whether seemingly the ideas or the materials, generates it’s own set of limits, hence work comes from work.  
    In addition to a catalog of ideas being generated (which also, reciprocally, informs the work being actualized), I am working on a final project, employing two forms of limit:  1. A specific location and 2. A collaboration.  Abby and I are working on an installation in the Freese’s building.  After an initial meeting to talk about possible ideas, we did some material experiments.  We met again to discuss the results and then did further experimentation based on the work so far.  We have been looking at and discussing some other artists who’ve worked in similar ways or with similar materials, for ways of communicating ideas about our project.  
    Some of the reading that I’ve discovered to be immensely topical specifically with the generation of rules and limits: Paola Morsiani and Trevor Smith;  Andrea Zittel: Critical Space; Prestel 2005

www.cmcanow.org

 1.Artists' Potluck Party (Public Event)

Event Date: 21 November 2008 19:00 (Single Day Event)

Second annual Potluck Party for Artists provides an opportunity to network with other artists and CMCA staff, view exhibitions, and find out more about CMCA exhibitions and programs. Door prizes and surprises! Artists who plan to attend may submit up to 3 images of their work for a slide presentation that will be ongoing during the event. Email jpegs of artwork to Cathy Melio, education director at cmelio@cmcanow.org by November 19th. Free admission Phone 207-236-2875 x 303 for more information.   2.         Transitions CMCA is seeking submissions for Transitions, an on-going series featuring film and video by contemporary artists. The series takes place during the short window of time in which the exhibitions in our Main Gallery are being dismantled and reinstalled, and will be exhibited on a monitor at the visitors’ entrance. Transitions will feature animation, film, new media, and video, etc . . .  (Submission details on website)

It is tempting, when faced with the task of identifying my own artistic attitude, to think about my moods, interests, psychological and emotional perspectives, approaches (as we are directed to consider it) towards working.  That turns out to be a shallow kind of pool.  There’s a bit of curiosity, sometimes enthusiasm, and somewhere between a purposeful and compulsory meditative inclination, albeit a physical meditation: raking leaves, mowing the lawn in patterned rows, making lists, arranging objects, fabric, time. I am sincere, sometimes to the point of a very silent awe-filled, not cynical, not detached, not amused.  But again, this feels shallow.

If there is too much stimulus: reading, talking, strong emotions like grief, anxiety, fear, anger, or exuberance, there is no focus and no clarity.  There is too much energy in my body for the requisite stillness to consider and build.

At any rate, what if these reflections about myself are not expressed in my work?  I do not consider expressing them as I approach a project, asking the directed questions along the way:  what color suggests sincerity? what shapes and how many times avoid cynicism? is layered fabric best suited to express connectedness?  So perhaps these attitudes are not my artistic attitudes?  

As with artistic identity, I don’t find my attitude in art-making differentiated enough from my attitude generally, and so would be surprised if there was another answer.  On the other hand, perhaps an attitude unexpressed, disembodied, is no attitude at all.  Specifically, an attitude develops in relation to working and to materials.  A reciprocity, a relationship.  

It then becomes interesting to look to my work for it’s attitude, which might give me insight into my relationship with it.  I think the time invested and apparent in the work suggests sincerity and a kind of equilibrium.  The repetition and hand-work reflect a connectedness to the material and to the meditative quality of process. The restraint in color palette, and other features of simplicity are ways of satisfying curiosity through  controlled, analytically-styled structure. The lack of overt personal or biographical content suggest a cerebral quality, but the personal, organic, and hand-assembled quality of the materials themselves (quilts, food, interiors) humanize and concretize what could otherwise slip into abstraction.

As I read the chapters on artistic identity, the idea of identity began to take form according to how it seems meaningful in my work and by extension, to what I understand as it’s entirety (not just in an artistic sense).  I suppose this is because I don’t find the artistic identity more divorced from my identity in the most expansive and holistic sense.  

I am entertaining the idea that I am what I see, which is both active and passive. This seeing seems a created function, in some part purposeful and in some part inadvertent. To believe that it is created, however, is a thrilling faith.  

The accrual and differentiation of all the bits of information and their modes, vehicles and embodiments that comprise identity (and ultimately everything) become most illuminated in margins and boundaries, the edges, limits, and transitions between definitions and conventions.  I believe I somehow am this, create this, and show this.

I think it is a good aspiration to become closer and closer in what we are, do, and see. An unlearning, in all likelihood. 

How about this? 

I make sculptures using various materials and techniques including, but not limited to, fabric, thread, and glue which I cut, stitch, layer, arrange, and embroider.

It is interesting and of some concern that what I make is requiring so much categorization and definition.  I think the sculpture aspect is primary and the quilt aspect is secondary.  The "quilt" aspect should be considered a choice, not default.

I do need to find a way to articulate what I do so that I do not mislead preemptively by off-handedly suggesting "quilt" for example, just because I'm used to saying it.  On the other hand, does the fiber medium require separate categorization?

In thinking about dichotomies such as internal vs external and one’s relationship with audience, I remember the section of Explaining Creativity when the author describes co-sleeping: in Japan, we are born independent and co-sleeping engenders useful dependence, while in the US we need to foster independence as if it were unnatural to us.  

To me these thoughts are linked in so far as they are chosen perspectives, not reflections of objective states.

In our small group discussions last week, John suggested that my approach to audience was selfish, but I would suggest that presupposes my ultimate independence and possible, if not likely, conflicting interest with that audience.  I agree that I am selfish from a certain perspective, but I do not think of that as negative because I don’t presuppose conflict, but mutualism.

I’m not sure I can tell the difference between internal and external.  Why does one thing strike us and another not?  What is the source of our imaginings and feeling if not at least referred to things outside ourselves: animals, lovers, history?

I could just say that my sources are internal and external, but that seems to my intuition, imprecise.  Something approximating both of those happens, but the necessary conjunction suggests neither.  It seems just a matter of perspective to assign interiority or externalization to the same impulses.  I think my work itself revolves around the disintegration of some of these boundaries.

I work compelled by a reciprocal exigency ceaselessly and apparently exerted in alternation between materials and mind.  I find expression of the simultaneously created and creative capacities of everyday objects through incremental change and elaborate specificity.  I do not want to move past objects, or transcend, but to move further into them, to embed.

I understand my constituency in a prioritezed order starting with myself, and moving out from there in a ripple effect, one that I’m not entirely comfortable with. I can also say, (and hope that its true, but at the least aspire to the idea) that unlike the panel at the Farnsworth when posed with the question, if no one saw my work I would still make it.

I have difficulty every time the idea of an audience comes up, except perhaps when it can be understood that the artist is also an audience.  I’m not sure exactly why this is, because I don’t doubt the framework of ideas within which the audience is perpetually conjured to the point of necessity.  However, from a perspective of trying to make and observe and question, I find it completely disruptive.  I believe my constituency is first and foremost myself.  Of course this self is problematized as much as any public constituency in virtue of consciousness and socialization.  It is easier for me to think of the problems of communicating if I think of them as internal problems.  After all, the communication never fully makes the parties commensurate, even in the most direct  (as if that were possible) speech or equations, even, between lovers (in the Platonic ideal).

In the case of Isaac Julien, Weintraub suggests (pg. 27) that his audience is “only people who are willing to accept intellectual challenges, dislodge entrenched attitudes, endure emotional disruptions, and accommodate seismic shifts in their value systems.”  Aren’t these people similar to Julien himself and do they require him at all for anything more than some kind of mutualistic ego-gratification?  Does this audience need the particularity of his insights or is this a form of entertainment?  I’m not sure the answers to these questions, but I do wonder about the value of the constituency in this case.  In a way, I relate to it, in so far as, the democratic ideal of diversity aside, I want people around who stand a chance of relating to me, and I to them. That would bring me to the second tier of my constituency: friends and people I care about.  

To step back, it seems that I require being able to make and then to step back from the things that I make to understand my way of seeing and the things that concern me most.  Analysis requires consciousness, or a sort of self-splitting between doer and thinker.  The consideration and development of my ideas and concerns is enriched by this additional level of reflective and discursive engagement with myself and interested parties (friends and people I care about.)  In the complicated trappings of self, there is inevitable relativity.  That means, that I feel inextricable from context and circumstance and move beyond the immediacy of self and friends to galleries and other explicit art venues, another realm of people who stand a chance of relating, the field, if you like.  To my great dismay, I also find that to see myself I need to look from as many angles as possible, meaning, sometimes different settings, such as a gallery, impart the context that changes the work, or reveals something about it.  It also gives legitimacy, and therefore cause to look, to the constituency, no matter how small.  This upsets my hermetic inclinations.

I like Schukmann’s quiet, organic, evolutionary, and fairly isolated work.

I try to communicate to people somewhere between Rovner and Ritchie.  By the end of college, I saw all information in terms of it’s conveyance, in other words, the “how” of it.  It was this way of seeing that made me turn to art as a philosophical vehicle for truth and knowledge, one that self consciously considers how.  I find the range of tools and methods at the disposal of art, and it’s therefore more holistic capability, to yield more satisfying insight.  Rovner’s use of implicit meaning and metaphor seems at the heart of all understanding and with a great capacity for relatability. Arranging sound and image through time and space to suggest associations seems a subtle and powerful (perhaps because of it’s subtlety) way of creating meaning. I am also drawn to the intelligibility of order, systems, and language.  In this way, Ritchie’s systematized and ordered world makes me consider my rationale for using repetition, duplication, and my work on bodies of work, or series of pieces.  When internal relationships are created, it gives the audience a built in key for reference.  A piece on it’s own has a larger spectrum of possibility, but one brought into relation with another, points to similarity and divergence, creates limits and emphasis.  The use of overall patterning directs the viewers to points of consonance and departure.  

In answering all of these questions, I find myself wanting to refer to artists that were not in the chapter pertaining to the particular topic.  For example, in considering how I relate to audience, I think about Rovner, (not in the relating chapter).  I do have, like Rovner, however, a detached way of relating to the audience, “imposing special demands on viewers” (pg. 44)  Once within that framework, however, I relate to Charles Ray and Tiravanija. I like to use recognizable, mundane materials, usually with some reference to functional possibility, such as quilts.  I try to explore these objects through transparent and overt construction and manipulation to “disrupt assumptions” about these objects, which are so intimate to daily living, yet for that reason often overlooked.  In a piece, “Gold Quilts”, two seemingly identical quilts reveal vast material discrepancies.  In a piece, “Still Life”, it is not abstracted, in so far as it is not a painting or sculpture of paper grocery bags and apples, it is paper grocery bags and apples.  Although this is the way I’ve been working, I have sympathies  (sometimes going as far as project notes) aligned with Tiravanja’s ideas (“‘It’s always about being outside’” pg. 103) and methods, which create experiences and which put an art-lens on difficult to focus activity. I struggle with means to present ideas in this form, but in the vein of seeing all information inextricable from it’s conveyance, I find it impossible to ignore as a means in itself, and as a means suggesting possibilities outside of gallery and museum venues.

I had a kind of great prelude to my reading of Dewey.  I was driving my car, listening to music, and thinking about the piece I’m working on, another in the Finery series with lots of small pieces and regularity of pattern.  It occurred to me that there was a remarkable similarity between the music I like and the work I make, and as I drove I tried to think through those apparent likenesses and wondered if there were ways of making them more explicit in my work.  Almost doing some sort of translation between the music and the mechanisms of color and piecing.  I didn’t come up with anything that struck me as overwhelmingly interesting, maybe just some ideas for sketches of some sort.

Then I had the pleasure of reading Dewey and getting to witness, through reading, an alternate iteration of some of the ideas I was playing earlier that day.  As I was reading about the repetition of relationships and the way parts become, or are discrete, and their service to a whole, it seemed almost a direct description of aspects of my thinking about quilts. The medium seems, to my mind, perfectly suited to explorations of these ideas with it’s overt use of parts and patterns which culminate in space-time.  Each unit of repetition the incarnation of a relationship, that unit is often comprised of smaller units, and each unit needing to be tied to the whole, maybe through some structural variation or through color.

So far in critique, it’s been exciting to me to see hints of commonality despite the variety of approaches and outcomes.  It occurred to me to write them down in order to better relate to some of the work that on it’s face appears so disparate, and also in starting to think of possible themes for the Without Borders show. (Of course, I no doubt see my interests in everything, so bear with me.)

I would frame the overall content in some broad way as “created reality”.  The way I see that in some of the work so far:

Alex: fluid definition in self-portraiture.  The creation of the portraiture by the flocking algorithm, as well as the extent to which the viewer searches for an image in flux.

Julian:  he’s creating the house, the house is creating him.  The extent to which we are implicated by the things around us, the extent to which we have choices.

Matt: the spectrum of body modification represents a cultural value system that is distinct from the physicality and materiality of the transformations.  Self is not as distinct from body as it’s often described and can be changed through physical transformation.  These transformations are based on theory, in large part cultural, in other words, they are ideas.

Abby: not having seen work in critique, I think of one of the 1st creative responses with the biofeedback camera, a way to change ourselves through things

Allison: again, not having seen work in critique but thinking about the creative response with flapjack: virtual and alternate realities.

Justin: creating an entire environment which changes the physical and emotional perception/state of the audience/participant.

me: questioning the integrity of objects, the extent to which everyday objects are created and create us.

I think this all works quite well with the phrase "without borders".  It has that sense of mutable or non-existent definition, a kind of contiguity of material.