art

Zugzwang, Ask the Box, Exquisite Corpse Generator, and The Stupendous Chrissy Parker Project were made on a Mac in the late 90s/early 2000s as HTML art and/or web interactivity. As such, they can't really be made mobile friendly without ruining them, since their original markup and design are part of the project, as they say. Please turn your phone on its side if necessary.

Gallery of Contemporary Art (2003-2022). Various media. My "modern"-looking work; the REAL ART. I feel that this project, more than others, represents my MFA's "contemporization" of my pratice/output. It's like a merging of my own stubborn "draw cool stuff" childhood tendencies and the broader, more engaged conversation/community of contemporary art. Anyway, this art is weird, and some of it looks like it didn't take much time to make and so runs afoul of a lot of the geeky-conservative assessments of art I run across here on the internet, in which a good rating seems contingent upon the perception of complexity or invested time. I part ways with conservative geekdom there.

Zugzwang (2002, some re-working in 2009 and 2014). Interactive text, Javascript, Photoshop. Click the image to generate a random absurdist sentence. This was absent for a long time and now returns. I wrote the program in Microsoft BASIC and then a friend in undergrad translated it into Javascript for me. The good part here, I think, is less the visual image or the programming than the language use/manipulation. Specifically, the "grammar hacking" in which I divide up sentences into several parts and make these parts interchangeably useful/comprehensible with different words. The title is a chess term, meaning a forced move. Duchamp (featured in the photo) was a Chess hound. I write about this elsewhere on my site!

Scanned-in Drawings (1994-2014). Pen and pencil on paper, colorization and cleanup in Photoshop. I'd always draw on my notebooks during academic lectures, and I felt some of my best work was there. So in response to this conviction I scanned some stuff. And, it's nice to prove that I can draw things-that-look-like-things, although this self-defining impulse may be indicative of some conservative or narcissistic tendencies that should be burned away. I mention "conservatism" a lot, in an artistic context. It means traditionalism, reliance on historical standards, dependency on the implicit standards of complex and fulfilled material execution...etc. It's not always bad but I think the people who are exclusively "conservative" in their appraisal or creation of artwork tend not to be so self or culturally aware. Traditionalist artistic conservatism amounts to entrapment within a particular socio-historical context.

Ask the Box (2006-2007). Public participation, html. A web-based "Dear Abbey" (no longer accepting questions). The photo at left is from perhaps the best submission in "Ask the Box", halfway down the page: "What does a carrot stuck through the middle of a potato look like after 1 month of hanging in the back window of your car?"; it almost requires its own webspace.

Exquisite Corpse Generator (2001-2003). Public participation, Photoshop, html. People were asked to choose body parts from a set to assemble their own exquisite corpse. This project is kind of art school'ish, in that it seems like an assignment (which it was). It would have been truer to form if each "corpse" had been designed by a few different people, as the original idea, in France in such-and-such a year (chase the link above if you're curious), was either a textual, image-based, or combined image-text version of the "Mad Libs" game.

The Stupendous Chrissy Parker Project (2005). Public participation, html, Photoshop. A fake dating service profile draws in love letters from across the United States. Ethically questionable but interesting. It illustrates, yet again, how easy it is to fall in love with a fantasy. The girl is a person known to me who was in on the project and who authorized the use of her teenaged photos. The profile was written by me to be the "perfect woman" (altruistic job, doesn't earn more than you, "old fashioned", looking for a "nice guy", not into looks), and it worked, although it certainly would not have without a pretty face attached. There's a bitterness to it all, but who doesn't want to say "this is all BS" to the mating game?

Guitar-to-Trumpet Theory Chart (2005). Photoshop. A graphical beginner's guide to playing the trumpet intended for guitar players with some music theory background. In 2007 I picked up a trumpet and taught it to myself, by noting the pitches of the ascending harmonic series of an open horn (no valves depressed) and then noting that different combinations of valve depressions lengthened the vibrating column of air thereby reducing those pitches by 1-5 semitones (5 semitones being the interval of a tritone, or flatted 5th/sharp 4th). It's all on the chart.

Monochrome Macintosh Art (1986-1991). Mouse-drawn "pixel art" in Superpaint. Made on my breadbox/beige toaster Mac (a 512k Mac, then a Mac Plus, and possible later a Mac SE -- not one of these entities had more than 4 megabytes of RAM) when I was age 10-15. This was pretty much all I did 'til I got my first girlfriend at age 16. In some ways I blame that incident for making me less interesting; I hung out with her and stopped making World Builder games and drawing/writing stuff (at least for some time). I think it's accurate to call that development a selling-out; maybe artists should be monks.

Bugchart (2004). HTML, genius. My greatest artistic/intellectual achievement.

WARHAWK (2010). Wood blocks, stickers of appropriated WW2 fighter plane nose art. This turned out to be the most popular/successful piece I made in my MFA program. Unfortunately, the structure of the program precluded it from being included in my final show. I think if I had to do my MFA over again, I would focus more on "fun" work like this, and less on the serious furrowed-brow stuff that for whatever reason I concentrated on from 2009-2011. If you look for common threads in my artwork here, on this site, I think you'll find cartoonish fun to be a stand-out. Ironically, one of my most "fun" pieces (this) is also my most overtly political piece; someone told me that politics or at least an affectation of politics is the calling card of a stick-in-the-mud intellectual vanity that tends to prevail in academic art. Avoid the Noid!

The Caterpillar and the Horse (2007). Maya. Three dimensional algorithmically generated images. This document includes a fair amount of text commentary. I think I never really progressed, in Maya (a professional 3D software package), beyond a certain rudimentary stage. But this is what I did with what I had, and I although it's not very "good" in a way (i.e., it doesn't do as much with the software tools as is possible, issues of it being creative/original/interesting/cool/fulfilled-in-its-own-right notwithstanding), I keep it in my web portfolio in part because 3D modeling is such a large and important part of digital imaging culture (think of all those Pixar and Dreamworks movies, and then of modern video games...it's a huge realm). An industry 3D modeler would probably scoff and call my work here "rudimentary." In a way, that stance can be dismissed as the rhetorical trap of expertise: an inability to evaluate an image or object on its own merit, but instead necessarily as the product of built-in standards.

My First Oil Painting (2007). Oil on canvas. More journalistic/expository writing to be found here. This was actually a commission, but a rather loose one -- I think the instructions were to somehow illustrate "togetherness," and then to use purple. I'm not sure if I entirely succeeded in fulfilling the second part of the commission; there were some complaints and they might have been justified. What has happened to abstract painting in the last 65 years is...interesting. It started out being revolutionary, but now, if you do a Google image search for "corporate art," you'll see all, 100%, abstract work. Abstraction is the new "muzak" of the art world -- recognizable subjects are by their nature cultural references, and therefore political in nature. The only way to avoid offending someone is to make public art abstract. A realistic drawing of a dog is now more controversial than blobs and smears and shapes and lines on a canvas. That said, I like "middle path" stuff such as my painting here: it looks like something, it clearly is something, but it's been weirdified in some way.