poetry in slow motion

A great video featuring slow motion sequences of skaters doing their thing. The music that accompanies the video is 'Nightfall' by Mileece. Gotta respect the abilities/artistry of these kids.

How artists must dress

What you wear to an opening can be almost important as the work you're showing...

Artists must first of all distinguish themselves from members of the adjacent professional classes typically present at art world events: dealers, critics, curators, and caterers. They must second of all take care not to look like artists. This double negation founds the generative logic of artists' fashion.

The relationship between an artist's work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes.

The relationship between an artist's work and attire should function in the manner of a dialectic, in which the discrepancy between the personal appearance of the artist and the appearance of her work is resolved into a higher conceptual unity. An artist's attire should open her work to a wider range of interpretive possibilities.

The artist's sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work. When dressing, an artist should imagine a five-paragraph review of his clothes—the attitudes and intentions they reveal, their topicality, their relationship to history, the extent to which they challenge or endorse, subvert or affirm dominant forms of fashion—written by a critic he detests.

Communicating an attitude of complete indifference to one's personal appearance is only achievable through a process of self-reflexive critique bordering on the obsessive. Artists who are in realityoblivious to how they dress never achieve this effect.

Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks.

An artist compensates for a limited wardrobe budget by making creative and entertaining clothing choices, much in the way that a dog compensates for a lack of speech through vigorous barking.

Artists are not only permitted but are in fact required to be underdressed at formal institutional functions. But egregious slovenliness without regard to context is a childish ploy, easily seen through.

An artist may dress like a member of the proletariat, but shouldn't imagine he's fooling anyone.

The affluent artist may make a gesture of class solidarity by dressing poorly. She is advised to keep in mind that, at an art opening, the best way to spot an heiress is to look for a destitute schizophrenic. Middle-class or working-class artists, the destitute, and the schizophrenic can use this principle to their social advantage.

The extension of fashion into the violation of norms of personal hygiene and basic grooming constitutes the final arena for radicalism in artists' fashion. Brave, fragrant souls! You will be admired from a distance.

-Roger White

(source)

New interview

There's a new interview with me by Brent Hallard up on his art blog, Visual Discrepancies. Go check it out!

Brent: One of the things that intrigue me about your work is how very immediate it feels.
But then, also, there is this fine sense of order; a tension that just reads so. There are often layers, sometime layers upon layers, some almost obliterated, or covered over. There is this sense of frenzy at work, though every move feels so considered, every layer, or clean slate making sense to the next. But this is, of course, looking at a finished piece. I’m sure the actual act, the sitting looking, the going back in, the results so far… these aren’t perfectly arranged layers and movements that happen. What appears in the end as a beautiful display of order and chaos, a pitched tension between control and free play, is something worked at?

Tim: You’ve hit on a lot of what goes on in my decision-making process while painting. There is a lot of back and forth, playing one layer/color/direction off of another, making decisions about how much to save and what to sacrifice. There is a dance between control and chaos that contributes to that tension that you sense... (read more here)

The High Line

Spent part of Friday afternoon exploring the newly opened High Line Park in the Meatpacking District of New York. It’s a great example of reclaimed urban space.

The first section between Ganesvoort Street and West 20th is currently open, but if all goes well, the park will extend up to west 30th in 2010.

Find out more about the park here: The High Line

Up all night

Detail from a recent work on paper.

Had one of those 'brain won't shut off so don't even think about trying to sleep' episodes after climbing into bed last night. The only remedy was to get up and write as much of that stuff down as I could. All of it was art-related and the pages of my art journal from this session were filled with random notes about projects and other things I couldn't stop thinking about for some reason.

From 1:45am until about 3:15am, I filled 7 pages with ideas for projects that I'm already pursuing or might pursue in the near future with painting, mixed media, works on paper, photography, printmaking as well as a major reorganization of the works in my studio. Getting it all written down was a good thing. Now, all I have to do is dust off my alchemy skills to make more hours in the day in order to get these things done...

Plastic mayhem

Artworks and other objects primarily made of plastics have been degrading for years and the problem doesn't seem to be going away any time soon according to this article from Slate.com.

(via c-monster)

waterfalls damage

Cafe sues over 'Waterfalls' spray

passages

Two photos of my main drawing/painting wall. The first one, taken in May, 2007 (black and white), shows the wall not long after I had repainted it (for an open studio event). After that, I decided to not bother repainting the walls and opted for letting whatever wayward marks to remain as part of the space, as in the second shot from February, 2009.

The drips and spatters are like markers in time. Looking at some of the outlines of previous works, I can sometimes recall exactly which piece I painted, if not when. On the other hand, there are outlines marked off that only represent part of the story, an intermediate point in the process where I may have been working on something only to either abandon it or move to finishing the piece on the floor or a table.

Whatever the case may be, the paint on the walls and floor serve as inspiration for me to keep going, regardless of whatever else is happening outside the studio.