Limbo This and the Time Machine

#22 – Tuesday August 16th

Having spent the last month working on my contribution to the SRAM pART Project, I’ve been thinking more about sculpture than usual, and while wandering around Arizona Art Supply, gathering bit and pieces for new canvasses, I stopped to peruse the magazine rack. Leafing through a copy of Art In America, I discovered an exhibition announcement for the artist Rebecca Horn. I first became aware of her work in 1984, a group of kinetic sculptures, exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. It was an amazing show, made more poignant by the fact, at the time, I was working on a group of viewer activated kinetic pieces, and while the intent behind my work was substantially different, seeing her sculpture certainly influenced my own explorations of motion. (A collection of my viewer activated sculptures was exhibited at Columbia College, Chicago in 1987. Illustrated is a detail of Novum Organum # 19 (Fan Chair), circa 1985) . I can’t say I’ve followed her work since, but stumbling across this announcement was the inspiration to reacquaint myself with her oeuvre. This is a video Rebecca Horn’s kinetic sculpture “Schmetterlingsschaukel” (Butterfly Swing), and a selection of her recent works to be shown at the Sean Kelly Gallery, NYC in September.

Music is an integral component of my world, and something is always swirling around the studio. I’ve eclectic tastes, and readily admit I’m attracted to the fast and loud with a killer hook . . . but there is a place for the quietly joyous melodic and that’s what’s been in the air this week . . . the band . . . DOS . . . the CD . . . Dos y Dos. Two electric bass guitars, Mike Watt and Kira Roessler. He bassist of the Minutemen, she the bassist of Black Flag, both seminal bands from the early days of punk, but what they do together isn’t very punk rather what David Krasnow called in his review on Studio 360, “delicate meditations in counterpoint from an instrument not known for its delicacy”. I find it mesmerizing . . . check it out HERE.

Two of the new canvasses dancing about in the wonderful netherworld of the last mark. I always try to have several pieces in play, traveling back and forth between . . . it’s the interplay, suggested avenues of exploration, a line drawn, and borrowed, a shape appropriated, and the necessity of time just looking . . . and others in the wings, awaiting their first mark. . .

Thanks for reading.

Charles