working

So, after assembling a bunch of little tiny parts, eventually you wind up with a large, more-or-less 3-d tree (this tree is not a flat drawing that is propped up in back, rather the shape is curved and you can actually view it from all angles) that is about 2′ tall:

Eventually, once the other four trees get put into place, a new line of text will be woven in their branches and the story will continue.

But first, I think I need to go back and rethink a few tree-related things I hadn’t really thought about before, primarily having to do with how the tree attaches to the base (which I will admit to having not thought of at all until I was standing there with this paper tree that needed to be attached to something). So that will take some figuring out, but it’s something that needs to be resolved before I just jump in and do the rest of the trees.

The plan is that I hope to have the whole “forest” part up and finished by Friday so I can move on to the next stage. I think that’s pretty doable.

(Best place to start if you don’t know anything about this project is with the post below this one.)

The thing about this book is that it has to be done in parts - it’s not at all the kind of thing that can be whipped out via an all-nighter or a marathon of a couple of serious drawing days. Everything is slow and methodical. Cut, measure, paint, dry, glue, dry some more, cut a little more, and so on. It sort of has its own pace, at least for now. And all of this is exaggerated by my documenting it as I go, so I have to first build the thing to see if it works, then take it apart and document it in parts, and then build it back up again.

But so far so good. Here are some preliminary pictures:

It starts out 10 1/2″ x 10 1/2″, which is the same size as an Artforum magazine (this will become important later, but for now it’s not a big deal). I haven’t fully bound it yet since that will be the very last step and there is no cover, so you’ll just have to trust me on all this.

Here it is opening…

and more open:

You can see one of the tree stumps popping up already. With a little help (there are tabs in the back that can be put into slots on the base to help keep them standing up), the rest of the stumps come to life:

There are two girls standing in this forest of tree stumps, and surrounding them - on a yellow banner - is the following text:
There is a consciousness there - it is absolutely real - at first glance you feel as though you are alone + miles away from the rest of the world - you come across that place + it’s like you’re not supposed to be there, not supposed to see this corner of the universe - it’s supposed to somehow always remain alone and unseen. And then, in an instant, that corner that had seemed so empty, vacant, dead, can seem to suddenly spring to life ad be totally filled with this presence - you’re not alone at all - you are actually surrounded - + the world isn’t empty at all and is in fact quite crowded. This place that seemed so desolate is brimming so full with life.

So the reader opens the book, the tree stumps and the girls pop up, and the reader reads the text. Now, if she wants to continue reading the book, she’ll need to do some work to reveal the next part of the story.

In the back of the book, there is a pouch:

…and in this pouch are the things she’ll need for the next part. (Note that I will probably have to remake the pouch so it can accommodate more things, but that’s not such a big deal.)

So here, I’m taking things out of the pouch:

…and here are the parts for one of the trees to be assembled, all spread out on a tabletop:

Basically, it’s is made out of a series of cut paper with tabs and slots and scored bits, all of which fit together and make the full tree. Once the whole forest is assembled, more text can be revealed and the reader can go on to do her next task.

So, later tonight: Assembling the tree…!

The very next post I’m going to write will have images of the building of the huge popup book, the one that starts at 12 x 12 and then opens up (hopefully) to something like 30′ long and 4′ high (it’s being built a little at a time, so I won’t know til it’s done how big it is). But I thought I’d write a few notes before I post all that, just explaining some things I’ve learned about popups, artists books, etc.

So first off, one of the very first revelations I had while working on this project is that an artist’s popup has to conform to very different rules than a commercially produced popup, and vice versa. While a popup you buy at Barnes and Noble has to withstand being opened and closed a million times, little kids playing with it (probably roughly) with sticky fingers and that sort of thing, an artist’s version of a popup doesn’t have to deal with any of this. The artist’s book sits on a pedestal or vitrine and is something to be touched by relatively few people.

Meanwhile, one of the challenges I immediately faced in building this book is that while a commercially available popup sits on a shelf and is only opened for minutes at a time per page, and artist’s book has to remain, well, “popped-up” for the duration of the exhibition - a month or more. This creates a whole new challenge, as gravity quickly works on paper and makes it sag; a popup section that looks terrific on a Monday starts to ache by Wednesday, and by Friday you’re lucky if any of it is still popping up at all.

As a response to this, I decided to make this project a blend of two “traditions” - one being popup and moveable books, and the other being one that’s new to me: papertoy. If you want a real treat, just do a Google image search on “papertoy” and all sorts of amazing things come up (a good example is here). It’s basically a blending of origami, urban vinyl, and the ongoing Etsy/craft craze, where fans make up different creatures that can be assembled out of paper; often, they make the patterns available online for free download so that anyone can cut, glue, and make their own.

I’m not making creatures per se, but the idea of working with a pattern that creates a three-dimensional thing is what got me. It seemed like the perfect solution, so that’s now what I’m making a few of the components from.

Meanwhile, the other thing that really comes to mind regarding commercial vs. art popup books, is that while a commercial book’s main goal is to delight and fascinate the reader (no small feat in that), the role of an artist’s book is quite different. The book itself works as a metaphor - in this case, of an ever-expanding universe that seems so small at first but then is vast and wonderful as you spend more time with it.

And what’s more, I like the way that books imply interactivity, even if - from a realistic standpoint - this isn’t always practical in a gallery setting. For instance, there is something about the way that a painting sits on the wall that it just is - regardless if anyone stops by to look at it or think about it, it just sort of exists and can always be seen out of the corner of your eye as you pass by. For a book to be seen at all, it has to be engaged - the reader has to actually hold the thing and turn the pages and, in a moveable book, move all the various little elements. It’s not really seen until it’s activated in this way; we all know you haven’t really looked at a book if it’s just sitting on a shelf closed, and so the reader becomes an active participant in completing the book as an object or work of art. In this case, by adding these 3-d elements that need to be assembled to get to the story, I’m really playing up that interactivity - the book I’m building simply cannot be read in any manner without someone there to do the work.

Anyway. Hopefully this will all make more sense later today when I post the pictures…

This was one of those examples of working on a piece where you sit and stare and think endlessly for hours and hours and just can’t get the thing done… and then wake up the next morning and finish it like it was the easiest thing all along. Hmmm, art is weird like that…!

It’s a two panel drawing (ie, done over two sheets of paper, which seems to be how I’ve been working lately):

Incidentally, I’ve been wanting to mention for some time how psyched I am to be working with the Bravin Lee folks. A couple of people asked me about it recently, so I just wanted to toss it in there. They’re nice, supportive, professional, and just terrific all around. I woke up this morning and started thinking about it and it just made me happy to be an artist… so, YAY! I know this makes me sound ridiculously silly to post this, but eh… so what.

It’s pouring outside. Oswald and I are hunkered down in my studio and I’m drawing away. And my studio is a huge mess, just the way I like it.

Ack… as my work has gotten bigger (and it is, slowly but surely, getting bigger) it has also gotten a lot less bloggerific, meaning that it’s not as easy to simply slap a new drawing on the scanner, and then toss it up on this site. This piece, which is made up of two tall, vertical panels, looks in the scan like there are actually four panels since I had to scan it in in two chunks (and it wouldn’t fit on the scanbed length-wise). After some fumbling with Photoshop, I decided just to go ahead and put it up… but bear in mind that the horizontal line coming across the middle isn’t in the actual piece.

Confusing, I know… gotta get it professionally photographed…

About two weeks ago, I was killing time and avoiding doing real work by checking out the site Etsy.com. On Etsy, people sell their wares (t-shirts, tote bags, etc) and what I saw over and over was some really nice screenprinting on different homemade items. Where were all these craftspeople getting access to a press? Home screenprinting is a huge pain - it’s messy and you need a lot of space and exacting conditions, for starters. I’ve never been able to get it to work.

So there I was, jealously looking at all these listings until I found one that the young woman who was selling some shirts wrote, “These images are gocco’ed onto the fabric…” and I realized there was a word there I had never heard. I googled “gocco” and wound up here… I read some more and googled some more and before I knew it, I was on a grand quest to buy myself a Print Gocco.

They’re hard to find in NY, but after a little legwork I wound up at NY Central Art Supply where they had two left in the case (I bought one and one of my students bought the other. I assume they have more on the way?). I finally tried it out today. And oh my god…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So, what is a Print Gocco? This is the box:

They’re made in Japan. And in the box is a little kit that you use to make prints. Everything takes place inside this little self-contained plastic box - there is no separate darkroom, no chemicals that you have to mess with. The “darkroom” and everything is somehow ingeniously contained in this box. The whole thing is made for people who live in apartments to make their own prints - whereas you really need to live in a house (with a big tub and plenty of spare room) to make standard silkscreen prints, to make Goccos all you need is a kitchen table. (I PROMISE you this is true. There is zero mess. There is zero smell. I was up and running in ten minutes with my first prints done, and I’m someone who finds it hard to follow directions the first time through.)

You wind up with a print that looks an awful lot like a traditional screenprint:

(The roughness of the texture of the bark on the tree comes from the way in which I drew it, not from the process itself.)

This might be the single most clever art supply I have ever encountered. You can print on just about anything, and I keep thinking it will lend itself well to making cards, stickers, t-shirts, and - what I bought it for - artist’s books. Again, I can’t overstress how easy it was and how I had my first prints done so quickly and easily.

Ok, possible drawbacks:
Purchasing the thing was difficult, first because it was hard to find and secondly because it was $200. (You can get them on ebay for around $130, but then you have to pay for shipping from Japan which drives the price up to at least that.) However, absolutely everything you need to make two screens and a ton of prints are in the kit, and I think that if you bought the equivilant in silkscreening materials, you’d be out as much if not more.

The replacement parts - new screens, lightbulbs, ink, etc - are all made by the company that makes the kit… which has me scared to find out how much they will cost me. I haven’t crossed this bridge yet, and I still think - given the no mess, the ease of printing, etc. - that purchasing this thing was a great investment.

Ok, I am very excited now! I have a new toy and a ton of ideas to put it to good use.

Yay, the semester is done! All that’s left is a stack of grading, but I can deal with that. It was an absolutely terrific semester — I think this was the best yet. I miss my classes already.

For whatever reason, the end of the year has me thinking a lot about my own education and its relationship to my work. I have a feeling that this will take shape a little more as I start doing the research for my classes for next year, but a few random thoughts:

I went to school (speaking of college and grad school, so 1991-1997) and wound up, just because of where I was and the time it was, studying primarily with Conceptual, Minimal, and post-Minimal artists. I don’t think I was even aware of it at the time, since I - like a lot of students - just basically took the classes available to me without really asking (if the teacher teaching the class was “famous” then all the better - but I never really questioned the ideology that they embraced).

I look back on all this and think about what a strange fit it was. I was attracted to art because it gave me a forum and a place to express something that I couldn’t express anywhere else - and that something, while I still struggle to explain what it is, is related to my personal experience in the world. As I sit here, staring at the screen, all I can think to say to explain it is “the awkwardness of being alive,” but that’s not quite right. Maybe the best I can think of at this moment is “the awkwardness of me being alive right now.” Regardless of my fumbling with the best way to say it, the point is that I was always very interested in trying to capture bits of myself as an individual - my thoughts, feelings, my inhabited self (if that’s not too artsy). And in turn, I’ve always been interested in work that speaks to the same thing for other people.

All of this, of course, was the antithesis of what my instructors were interested in. They wanted to talk about theory and philosophy and to move art away from “therapy” and personal experience. i should point out that I respect the work from this period and that many of my teachers were absolutely wonderful to me, and that I am grateful for their guidance. Lord knows what would have happened had I not been forceably exposed to this other way of thinking and of making art - somehow, for me (given my personality, etc), having this to work against was a strong motivator to stick to my own path.

But the kind of work that was really encouraged when I was a student (this may be true to this day, I’m not totally sure) was work that left me numb. It seemed that the more devoid of emotion and personal experience a work would be (and the slicker it was made), the higher grade it would get and the more praise would be heaped on it. I fell under the spell of this ideology for a long time and completely embraced it (my work was never slick, but it was thickly coated in irony and, as such, ok by these standards) and breaking free from it has been a long and difficult process.

All this results in me thinking about how teaching is one of the primary joys of my life, mostly because I get to be around students who are asking many of the same questions that I did, and still do. I’m so fortunate it worked out this way - hey, it could have easily have been that I would inherit class after class of students making Donald Judd-inspired work, but it just hasn’t shaken out that way. As it winds up, my students care deeply about making their work themselves (rather than using fabricators or buying pre-made elements), about having an emotional experience with their work and telling stories about their lives; they reject irony and consumerism and the flashiness of the art world.

I recognize this as a fleeting thing. Ten years from now, it’s entirely possible that I may have class after class of students who think that personal narrative is stupid. It will be their right to decide that and my job to figure out the best way to guide them. But for right now? I’m so lucky to have this perfect match.
**

(sort of a postscript)
I gave this post a title that’s a line from a Sleater-Kinney song called What’s Mine is Yours. For me, it captures all the anxiety and frustrations of being young and trapped in a place (a small town, in school) you’re perpetually trying to get out of.
Did you ever get the feeling that you don’t belong?
Said the teacher in the classroom, I think there’s something wrong.
But your desks are too heavy
And your walls are too white
And your rules are all wrong
And it’s either run or fight.
Well, I’m still running…

It gets me everytime I hear it. This is why I really consider teaching to be part of my artistic practice - because I’m still running and I don’t think I’ll ever stop.