On his 80th birthday, photographic artist Brett Weston fed sixty years worth of his negatives into the large fireplace in his home in Hawaii. Some of the negatives didn't burn immediately. So Weston doused them with kerosene.
Surrealist author Franz Kafka requested his writings be destroyed upon his death. Were it not for Kafka's close friend and editor Max Brod, no one would know anything about Kafka's writings, which have come to symbolize modern man's anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an unintelligible, hostile, or indifferent world. That would be a shame to have missed. I digress.
These artists are among the many whose self accomplishment is attained through the act of creating... producing... building... filming. Weston proved his strong belief that photographic prints should only be made by the hands of the person who created the negative. He was disgusted at his brother's greed in regards to his famous father's negative collection, as his brother would reprint works of the late Edward Weston and sell them for thousands of dollars each.
So when does the need to create get superseded by the need to destroy? There's many situations, one which I sadly witnessed last week in North Caldwell, NJ. The greed to build. My creative working space includes a large window that, at times, shows imagery better than anything available on television. It's a view to 300 acres of woodland open space. Well, as of last week, there's now maybe 280. The other morning I wondered what 2 men with medium sized chain saws could possibly do to my view. Four hours later I knew they could completely alter it. Trees were killed. Rabbits ran scared. Fox and groundhog holes got sealed by trucks with four foot wheels. Birds nests came crashing down. Cicadas flew off in fear. The deer do not understand where their grazing land went. The elegant, long-winged hawk no longer glides above it all.
But I'll soon get to gaze out upon 27 luxury estates. And within a few years, beyond that I can walk my dog up to a group of 140 age restricted town homes. I won't have to worry about deer ticks. I'll just have a few more cars at each new stoplight to help all the new traffic, which may help slow down the cars which kill the deer crossing the roads looking for a new home.
In his mind, the builder will have created an awesome masterpiece. And he'll keep going as long as he finds more hawks soaring in slow motion.
Here is what I wrote to accompany the video–written December 21, 2005:
On an early Sunday morning, December 4, 2005, I woke up to fluffy falling snow. The streets were fairly quiet since they had about two inches of coverage. I got up and got ready to drive over the George Washington Bridge to meet Ric. I wasn’t feeling well the night before. I had a headache that wouldn’t go away and a slight fever so I barely had my usual four hours of sleep. On this morning, the number of sleep hours didn’t matter. I was spending the day with Ric, my friend, my muse. It had been a year since I’d seen him.
I made it over the George Washington almost two hours later than planned, partly due to snow, but mostly due to my lack of getting out of bed early enough to deal with the predicted accidents on Route 80. Over the bridge I quickly made it to Payson Avenue. Outside the color was a beautiful six percent grey. The snow had stopped but it covered the city streets enough to hide the dirt. I waited outside Ric’s apartment in the car. I kept it running to keep the heat going. Across from Ric’s apartment building was the entrance to a large forest filled park. A grandfather walked by, pulling his granddaughter on a blue plastic sled. I laughed out loud as I watched her grab the snow she passed, balled it up and whacked the back of her grandfather’s head with every third step he took. It wasn’t malicious. It looked like pure innocent fun which must be why the old man didn’t seem to mind. Either that or he, too, was taking in the sight of the light shade of gray surrounding him.
Soon after, I saw a figure approach my side of the car. The car window cracked from the ice as I rolled it down. Ric stood beside the car with his purposeful bedridden, disheveled look. I cracked a smile and said, “Wow, you have a lot of hair!”
And so began our journey up north to Kilingsworth Connecticut. We were going to meet his younger brother, Felipe, another talented artist in the famous Molina family. The purpose of the visit was to film a documentary on Felipe. I had been wanting to document Ric and his family since almost the inception of our acquaintance. My immediate need was for a class assignment. I am often a nonconformist, and one way of displaying that for this class was to film six hours of outtake, digitize two hours of the footage, and edit for about twenty. I think it was more pain than just reading a few books and writing a paper. But my experience will be much longer lived than a paper I’d eventually toss into the corner of my studio.
I made Ric drive. I planned ahead to do his interview in the car. Ric is an accomplished musical artist, writer, songwriter, singer, producer. He also has talents in speaking. He can talk, and talk, and talk for hours about himself and his family. The great part is that every word is captivating. I knew he would have beautiful insight into the surrounding atmosphere of Felipe’s younger life, and I knew I’d want to capture it.
He talked about Felipe’s childhood, describing how he was able to appreciate things outside of the realm of normal childhood understanding, like studying yoga, advanced reading, and learning bee-bop on the violin. Felipe’s initial artistic interests lived in the musical arts. He had drawn some illustrations as a child, but never pursued his natural talent. He wanted to play music. Along with the violin he studied the saxophone and bass guitar. He played music into his early twenties, developing practice and work ethics that would reflect in his future as a painter.
Ric spent his early adult life living with Felipe in New York City. He summarized this time as a period where Felipe stopped developing his visual skills altogether. He was pursuing music alone, perhaps attempting to follow his brother’s success as a musician. Ric was unsure of Felipe’s future potential with music and remembers a significant time when that all seemed to change. It was May 17, Felipe’s birthday, when their father came to visit from Florida. Felipe was in his early twenties.
Felipe and Ric were raised under the affect of their artistic father, Alvaro Namen. Much predilection can be attributed to the father’s career as a successful illustrator and painter. It was not that Ric and Felipe were pushed into studying and practicing the arts, but all around them on every wall was a result of their father’s lifetime of practicing a craft. He practiced until he reached perfection. And then he’d sometimes destroy the result. His lesson was to pursue the need of that little voice inside – the one that makes an artist’s need to create. He created art because he had to, not to sell it, not to show it in a gallery, but because he was driven to express himself. It was that drive that his sons picked up on. Ric had it, and found his direction. Felipe had it, but was heading down a path of expression that would not be a successful outlet. Ric remembers May 17 as the day of the “secret watercolor meeting.” Alvaro showed up to celebrate Felipe’s birthday, but more importantly, to discuss his direction as an artist. Ric was not present for their discussion, but afterward, Felipe had a gift from his father – a new set of watercolor brushes and an inspiration to begin painting – again.
We pulled into Felipe’s driveway – a modest house, very New England. The slippery snow discouraged me from looking around too much as we were greeted by a large golden retriever. Inside his house, four bouncy children appeared. They were all tiny, like Felipe’s build. As he greeted us he instantly looked familiar. I felt I had known him for years since I had known him vicariously through Ric. He was handsome, thin and wearing a big smile as his presence took over the room. I was afraid I wouldn’t metaphorically fit into his work space. He definitely needed a small space to contain his emanation.
He offered a cup of coffee, made a pot, and the camera began to roll. His winter work space is within the house, due to lack of heat in the outside barn. The barn looked intriguing but he was not anxious to show it due to the weather. He studio was familiar – exactly how I would keep it. Paint brushes were crammed into cups on his color board, paint strokes and dabs were all over the walls and wood floor. Canvases were hidden behind each other. A bare light bulb glowed in the corner.
Felipe played and act of false modesty. He was shy to start speaking. He kept commenting on how crazy it was to be speaking with him when there’s so other many artists out in the working art world. He knows he has talent and he knows he can speak to his process and inspirations. I knew he needed about thirty minutes to warm up and admit it in beautiful words. And he did.
He spoke of his inspirations, touching lightly upon his father’s influence at an early age up to his current working relationship with other artists such as the bass player Jaco Pastorious. He mentioned famous names such as Francis Bacon, Michelangelo, Jimmy Hendrix, and even Martin Luther King, whose every speech he has recorded on audio tape. He talked about his favorite forms of inspiration which are simply looking at art, noting what he sees and why he sees what he sees.
He tried to explain his process, which seems like something too strong to put into words. Felipe has the same drive his father possesses – the need to create – the need to make something. He draws constantly, referring to things he sees in front of him, and sometimes a literal translation of his dreams. His dreams are a big influence and he often paints what he saw in his thoughts while sleeping. In his gallery shows he often leaves out his sketchbooks for visitors to see his process.
He’s taken on a new direction with his work of the past year. He’s gone from an illustrative, petite detailed, colorful style to bolder shapes, larger proportions and abstract approach. It’s a very new look from what I’ve seen in Ric’s possession the last few years. Felipe feels it’s the artist’s necessity, and almost responsibility to change. He describes creativity as constantly evolving, with artists having the ongoing problem of creating something and “screwing with it.” He finds his influence to change mostly in people – his family, his church, his colleagues and even his pets. He calls his family experience a “bigger bag to dip into” for life experience. It was beautiful to watch him describe his sons’ evolvement in their own drawing skills. His best way to be the best artist he can be is as he says, “to experience life.”
I stayed with Felipe for almost five hours that day. I could have filmed more, but felt the family tugging at him from behind the studio door. It was a Sunday and I was afraid to interrupt to much of his family day. I left with the feeling that I knew I had something great on tape. I intend to document him again, maybe visiting in the Spring when he’s working out in his barn. I felt our conversation was so strong that I knew before I’d film him again, I would have to edit this quickly and then set it aside to digest.
It's now my favorite dog-walking time of year when fireflies are screaming in their loudest illumination. What is usually a dark, rock-tripping stutter through an empty field late at night with my greyhound is temporarily lit by what looks to be millions of little light bulbs known as fireflies, lightning bugs, and even glow worms. (They're actually beetles.)
I have to admit my captivation. I'm lucky to live in a very private wooded area where these bad boys can go nuts blinking their little butts on and off. Literally. I mean, literally they're bad boys - one theory is the males are blinking the brightest in the taller trees while the girls stay low, setting off a more seductive blink. If human interest were only so obvious. I digress.
I think even my dog is hypnotized by the spectacle. But then again the light show has me so mesmerized that Rocky now has all the time in the world to do his business. There's no rush on these evenings - I've forgotten any late night fear of wild dogs, rabid raccoons or foot-stomping deer. This is Soprano land in North NJ so there's also suspect cars slowing down once in a while.
No fears on firefly nights. Their massive cluster of lights is beyond any more desciptive words. I thought about trying to capture it on camera but I know I can not do the visual any justice. I tried Googling some firefly images and found no photographic evidence close to what I witness, but I did find this pictured installation from the 2004 Whitney Biennial. "Fireflies on the Water" is an installation with 150 lights, mirrors and water, by Yayoi Kusama.
Finally, I found a close approach to reality, but I doubt anyone sauntering through the Whitney is looking down and whispering "Go poo."
I was telling a colleague the other day that I have to keep my mountain bike in fine tune, as it has been an imperative tool with my work lately. I've been shooting with "mobile media" for over 4 years–partly because it was once something new to see with, but also because of its portability. Add my love for cycling–note in remote places that attract bears–and I have the perfect bike ride. One that is recorded. Here is a sample of some captures, all meant to be projected fairly large and shown in random looped order, but you'll get the dizzy idea enough with this. All below shot with a Blackberry.
Ernesto Garcia de León's "The Jester" accompanies cell phone video by Joanne Borek. Shot in Catalunya wine country, Spain, June 2009. Performed by Ric Molina.
I feel like Jack Torrance when it comes to writing my MFA thesis - even just the summary of it. By definition I don't procrastinate. I just can't get it done. I surf around blogs, museum sites, writers' journals.... like I'll find some answer to kick start summarizing the ideas in my head.
Well I did come across this little gem. It's the Pantone Color of the Year for 2009: PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa. Amazing. It's a slightly brighter chroma than my studio walls. I'm now surrounded by a color that "exemplifies the warmth and nurturing quality of the
sun, properties we as humans are naturally drawn to for reassurance."
In NJ that's equivalent to Hollywood Tans. In 8 minutes I'll be ready to write.
Nice slideshow of the AIA awards at this link. One winner is my almost-daily sight, The New York Times Building - described by AIA as "a design that is open and inviting, providing its occupants with a sense of the city around them." I wonder if that means the winning criteria was the number of street climbers.
I watched 2 films by Luis Buñuel last week - Un Chien Andalou and Las Hurdes (Land without bread). Some would consider Buñuel the father of cinematic Surrealism, so with his films on my mind while surfing the independent channels on digital cable, I stumbled across a Czech surrealist film, Otesánek (Little Otik), by Jan Švankmajer.
Ok, here's where I admit I'm studying Surrealism for my MFA class this semester, so it's not always the norm for me to catch 1 silent and 2 subtitled movies with 48 hours... but I have to admit, I love this shit. And it keeps my roommates off the first floor. If they can't hear Joe Buck or John Madden, they stay away.
Milos Forman once said "Disney + Buñuel = Švankmajer." That's pretty dead-on. Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating
a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses very sped-up
sequences when people walk and interact. His movies often involve
inanimate objects coming alive and being brought to life through his stop-motion technique.
Surrealism. Stop-motion with live action. Czech artist. An infertile couple in a poor apartment building who decide to raise a tree stump in the shape of a baby. Tree stump comes to life and eats people.
Who wouldn't give that at least a 5 minute chance?
Of course I was hooked. It's believable and yet totally outrageous. It's delightful. It's disturbing.
The The Rocky Mountain Hand-Made Filmmaking Camp will take a group of people for a week, throw them together into the
mountains guided by an off-beat professor, shake them up and stir
vigorously,and come out with a bunch of filmmakers who can make
movies without cameras and properly mix chemicals while sniffing D-76.
That actually sounds like my high school.
I'm just wondering how they pin up their prints for critique. The camp's website boasts an "outdoor classroom tent for classes and discussions."
A few days ago
I sat in on a lecture by Susanne Altmann, an Art Historian and Independent Curator. Based out of Dresden, she presented many exhibits she curated - mostly dealing with contemporary art and issues of society.
A name of an art group she worked with drew my attention simply because they were Polish and their works all boldly displayed their URL. I committed the name to memory and looked it up the following day. (If I wrote it down, I'd feel confident I had the information and would then proceed to lose the paper.)
twożywo.
Easy enough. With the aid of Google I landed at http://www.twozywo.art.pl - a site representing artists who seem to master the use of public space as a field of social communication. Beautiful typography, thoughtful phrases (if you look at the English version or use Systran) and a wonderful project on a character called Kapitana Europy.
After I spent quite some time on their site, I saw a little piece on
Kapitana Europy that made me laugh and say WTF? I soon realized that I
was watching what I thought to be a twożywo billboard chasing after me in my
dreams.
If you read a few posts here, you'll learn I have a way of sneaking in topics about 6-pack abs. With or without a great gluteus maximus to go along with it, I'd still point out this well done mini site on the Metropolitan Museum.
The Met's new Greek and Roman galleries will now allow the gallery to exhibit 95% of its collection. The reconstruction pays homage to the original architects and is beautifully depicted at nytimes.com with panoramas and 360's.
This site was on a list of resources from my MFA professor. After a bit of Googling, I resolved it has nothing to do with Gary David Goldberg's Ubu Productions. (You remember - "Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog!")
Founded in 1996 as a repository for avant-garde visual, concrete, and
sound poetry and the response to its marginal distribution of that style of material, it has expanded to become a formidable online collection. It is freely
available for noncommercial, educational use. It operates strictly by donation.
UbuWeb ensures open access to out-of-print works that find
a second life through digital reprint while representing the work of
contemporaries. It addresses problems in the distribution of and access
to intellectual materials. UbuWeb does not distribute commercially
viable works but rather resurrects sound, video and textual works
through their translation into a digital environment.
In other words, if an LP is out of print, they RIP it to an MP3. They scan as many old books as they can get their hands on; they post essays as fast as they can OCR them. Should something return to print, they will remove it from their site immediately.
The site encompasses hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.
If you've cared to read this far into my post, you MUST take a long look at the Film and Video section.
UbuWeb embodies an
unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a
Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4-dimensional space simultaneously expanding
and contracting in every direction, growing "rhizomatically" with
ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.
I'll kick off my own tribute to Women's History Month with a summary I wrote on Kiki Smith. Primarily known as a scupltor and printmaker, Kiki is a significant artist of this generation...
As I look at figures and images that
are suspended, animated, sometimes playful, I feel a most prominent
sense of grounding while viewing Kiki Smith’s work.
Mt first impression however is how fabulous
her dark sculptures look on The Whitney’s black stone floor. Truly
beautiful.
Her art is about essential things. In
an interview, she has said that in the 1980s she deliberately played
with and pushed forward certain unmentionables in American culture:
personal mortality, bodily decay, the brutality of dissolution. And
now she wants to play with an art-world unmentionable: sentimentality.
Her attitudes and expressions are clinically
precise and abstractly metaphorical. She has a remarkable simplicity
and directness.
In making work that's about the body,
she’s playing with the indestructibility of life, yet at the same
time, it's also about how you can just pierce it and it collapse, or
dies – demonstrated in her use of paper mache, beeswax, and other
fragile forms of media.
Kiki visualizes the use of skin (or lack thereof) as a sensitive
surface, a pierce-able surface, a cloaking surface and an impenetrable
surface. Some of these surfaces act as open shells, perhaps for
spirituality. Her wall and floor positioning adds a strong mystical
sense – what is perceived visually as a heavy physical frame is
positioned in a way that often defies gravity.
Perhaps her body of work is really a personal survey in visual
ideology. What each person sees and feels from her weighted or
un-weighted objects is exactly that – a reflection of their own
experience and perceptions.
I found a great quote of hers: “A friend of mine once said to me
that nobody was going to take the things that I or the girls I knew
did, seriously because we all worked in cardboard and stuff like that.
I think, for about five years after that I said, "Okay, fuck you, I'm
going to make everything really indestructible and you can't take it
away from me. You can say it's shit, but at least you can't say it's
shit because it's going to self-destruct."
Meet Sergio Garcia from Mexico. He works as a waiter in New York. He sends $350 a week to his family in Mexico.
Photographer Dulce Pinzón pays homage to Sergio and other Mexican immigrants in her project "The Real Stories of Superheros."
She puts a powerful cover onto brave and determined men and women that somehow
manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand
extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and
communities survive and prosper.
My two favorite materials exchanged hands at Christie's two nights ago - modern art and money. It was a record auction, earning almost a half billion dollars. The winner was of course a painting by Klimt - "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II"
Four telephone bidders went crazy for the portrait as the bids increased in only $500,000 increments.
The winning bid was for $87.9 milion by an anonymous phone bidder who joined the game after the painting hit $74 million. I wonder if he/she were wearing a baggy sweatshirt and comfy fleece pants like I am right now.
Last week a 14 year old aspiring activist artist was interrogated by two U.S. Secret Service agents.
At age 13, young Julia Wilson made a painting of George Bush. It had a photograph of him, a red circle over his face, a few scattered bullet holes drawn, a bloody knife in Bush's hand, and the words "Kill Bush." Julia posted the image on MySpace.
Uh oh.
The government somehow had time to find it. Secret Service agents felt the painting was extremely threatening to the life of the President of the United States. Agents interrupted Julia, now 14, at school after visiting her confused mother at home, telling her that since the art included the words, "Kill Bush," and since it was accessible to anyone on the Internet, there was a very strong likelihood that someone-possibly a terrorist from a foreign country-might see the image and be inspired to act upon it.
I'm sure the school visit and interrogation helped scare the Elmer's glue, crayons and 1st Amendment rights out of the school children's fingertips, but Julia is now more determined than ever to organize a student anti-war group, and she is convinced that George W. Bush is the worst president ever.
Note to agents: I didn't say that... really... I'm just quoting the full article.
Concerning fine art, that number doesn't phase me. Although it's a good thing David Geffen held out for that extra .5 mill, since there's speculation he's raising cash to buy The Los Angeles Times - so every little million counts.
Geffen sold Jasper Johns’s “False Start,” for $80 million (thankfully it wasn't a target for that much money), and Willem de Kooning’s “Police Gazette,” an abstract 1955 landscape, for $63.5 million. The buyers are both hedge fund billionaires. I guess you'd have to be.
The works of Gustav Klimt have been a hot item on the market lately. In fact, if any of you hedge fund billionaires or music moguls reading this feel like buying me a nice early Christmas present, there's 4 Klimt paintings up for auction on November 8 at Christie's. I'll take any, I'm not picky. And I'll thank you with a nice little blog post.
Sean Penn said once that film was too important a medium to waste. And if you were going to just use it to have fun, then why not get a hooker and an eight ball and find a hotel room. Now, while I don’t share Sean’s proclivity for the latter, I do agree with his statement to the former. It’s really hard to believe in film when you see so much of what passes for it these days.
Until now.
Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert reinforces his point. If you’re an art director, an artist, musician, actor, filmmaker, poet, whoever you are, whatever you do, this film is not to be missed.
Stunning photography and composition, sparse soundtrack with a compelling narrative by Laurence Fishburne make this worth seeking out. (Fishburne’s read of the narrative is so good, I’d pay to hear him read the phone book.)
Maybe this movie stunned me because of the steady diet of Hollywood and so-called “independent’ films I’ve been on for so long. That by default, I couldn’t help but be amazed because this film elevates the genre to a new level when compared to the Pulp Cinema phase we seem to be in now.
Or perhaps, it just shakes off the many layers of crap the industry has built-up over the years and gets back to what filmmakers wanted film to be, but lost sight.
Film is a director’s medium. You can’t help but notice how much Colbert’s photographic experience informs this film and his decisions as a director, to the point the photography is the performance. This film feels so intimate, yet looks so epic.
Epic.
A word I hardly use anymore. How can I? I see no films designed to be that these days. Maybe some great shots are thrown in here and there, but for the most part, the genre seems lost. Hero may be the closest film I can remember of recent times that you’d have to have in the same discussion. Even still, seems like membership in the David Lean fan club is nil.
Still, no description does this work justice. Because it is epic, even on a small scale. Snow was filmed in slow-motion and finished entirely in cepia tones. It is a portrait of humans living alongside the animal kingdom. Director Gregory Colbert based this film on the international
exhibitions of his large-scale prints of animals he documented over the
years, told through fictionalized letters from a man on a journey.
Is it a documentary? Commentary? Work of fiction? Yes. No. Maybe. It could be all of these things, yet, it doesn’t really matter. From a cinematic POV, the opening scene rivals anything I’ve ever seen on film and lets you know that it could be all of that.
A world-class photographer, Colbert took a decade off to travel around the world to shoot. (You can also read more on his and the film’s background here.)
Even the design of the main menu screen is gorgeous. Problem is, like anything this great, it’s also hard to find.
Ironic the film is about a journey, because that’s what will be required to seek it out anywhere. Hollywood Video or Blockbuster don’t list it online, not that I’d expect they would, so the only option appears to be to buy it via the film’s website here.
Just be cautioned, it’s expensive. Although it may also be the only film I’d pay $50 to own, and is certainly at home in any film collection. A nice design touch is that the DVD is also wrapped in a handmade bound cover made from a unique Nepalese paper finished with Beeswax. Once you open that, you know you’re about to experience something special.
As an art director, I can safely say
that a big pet peeve of creatives is to have "design by committee" (our
term of endearment for "too many cooks in the kitchen") or simply and
non-metaphorically put, too many opinions and managers in on a project.
To my surprise and delight, I found a project where too many chefs can
only make this work stronger...
Artist Antoni Miralda and his collaborators are almost halfway through a progressive dinner entitled "Tastes & Tongues / Sabores y Lenguas."
Tastes/Sabores is an evolving art work, with photographic, culinary
portraits of each city. It's been shown in museums in Caracas and
Bogotá, and has been invited to important international art festivals
in Latin America, including the Havana Biennial in June. The next
festival stop: the Sao Paulo Biennial in October. Other culinary
captures include Miami, Lima, Mexico
City and Havana. Soon it will go to Managua, Santo Domingo, San Juan,
Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Barcelona.
In each city, Tastes/Sabores becomes part festival, part imaginary
dinner party, with giant tongue-shaped photo collages, a video, and
dozens of unique objects created by inhabitants of that city. They
document daily examples of how food and creativity mesh.
When asked to explain the art of the exhibit, Miralda sighs: ''It's
always difficult, because there is not a product that people can take
home as a piece of art. So they take home more a memory, and an image,
or an experience.''
doych is written by me, Joanne Borek, a creative and user experience director in the interactive marketing field. All things creative. All things digital.
The digitally all-inclusive me can be found here: joanneborek.com
Spend $800 on some real earthy schooling.
I'll admit I'm one, too... or at least I try to be at cocktail parties. 
Better than Macy's customer appreciation day. 
