Category: Research
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DIY digression: bookmaking
One of the purposes of this blog is to sort through and prioritize intriguing notions and sources. I have an ongoing fascination with investigating how things work. (Hint: that’s a useful lens through which to analyze my art. It tends to be more about figuring out than advocating.) This blog is one approach to that, […]
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DIY digression: letterpress
The Firecracker Press sold me on the sheer excellence of letterpress art. If you’re ever in St. Louis, check them out for good design, poetry readings, edible printed tortillas, and people who know a lot about the history of typography. Most of us can’t afford to reinforce our floors to accommodate ridiculously heavy space hogs. […]
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Perforation
Until today, I only knew one way to perforate paper (without some mysterious steampunk machine). Pounce wheel (Not everyone knows about these things, so I’ll describe them first. I doubt I’d have heard of them if we didn’t sell them at ye olde art supply store. It’s a mural thing.) Pounce pads and powder sound […]
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Museum signs
The Crocker Art Museum signs got me thinking about how a museum’s signage reflects its values. Just to review, a typical sign will look like this one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Met does good, clean signs. They prioritize the artworks themselves while providing substantial additional information. The background color of the sign […]
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Notes from the Crocker
[ 2/25/15 edit: The links to individual artworks no longer function. The Crocker Art Museum’s website no longer serves as a digital representation of their holdings. I hope this is temporary, since it is certainly contrary to the larger trend of art museums releasing their collections digitally. ] It shames me to admit that last […]
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Bi-hourly comic
This, the most complicated mat I’ve cut to date, represents a twenty-four hour period through comics. This was…a stretch for me. (Three of the spaces are blank because nothing particularly noteworthy happened as I slept.) Between 7 and 9 am, I apparently found it crucial to record that: “As it transpired, that cappuchino [sic] at […]
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Four months of work
Correspondence art: and a scrap/accordion book to document it 1) Proust’s madeleines 2) Honkers 3) pictures of the pink/purple seal (designed with feedback from mail art #1) 4) bees 5) luggage tags 6) a book to document the project Opiate of the Masses the triptych about seductive things (with a […]
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Souvenirs, part 2
I recently completed what I considered a research trip to Europe. I brought a stack of quality paper and pencils and attempted to create as many souvenirs (aka postcards) as I could while engaged in the inevitable “hurry up and wait” parts of such travel. Obviously Gaudi’s Basilica de la Sagrada Familia made a […]
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Souvenirs
Does anyone else have a problem with the tradition of acquiring and distributing souvenirs? On the surface it is certainly a kind gesture, but… Possibility #1: “You’re going to R—, how lovely! Pick me up a ——- while you’re there!” In this common version, the traveler is transformed from a person with privilege and an […]
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Ambivalence and Paradox, part 4
This post concludes my attempt to answer the question “How can a person technically excluded from the canons of her field and religion relate to them?”, begun in parts 1, 2, and 3. Complexes These hinged blocks relate to a transformation puzzle Naoki Yoshimoto developed in 1971 “as he was searching for a way to […]
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Ambivalence and Paradox, part 3
This post continues to address the question “How can a person technically excluded from the canons of her field and religion relate to them?”, begun in parts 1 and 2. The more things change… An artist I admire gently but firmly informed me that my subsequent attempt to paint a version of a Jan van […]
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Ambivalence and Paradox, part 2
The previous post in this sequence asked: How can a person technically excluded from the canons of her field and religion relate to them? This and subsequent posts will present my attempts to answer this question. Awareness Her first step is to understand the tradition in which she works. With this in mind, last year […]
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Ambivalence and Paradox, part 1
What American or artist would fail to take umbrage if described as derivative or old-fashioned? We pride ourselves on self-determination, yet our use of that freedom is paradoxically dependent on the developmental duality of nature and nurture. In common parlance paradoxes are mere contradictions, but their charm and challenge come from the fact that they […]
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Living artistically with paradigm crises, part 2
[ continued from this post ] Grouping art history by theme and subjecting it to feminist interpretation can be a helpful exercise. As Bram Dijkstra pointed out in the introduction to Idols of Perversity, “while we may have forgotten the specific content of these images, they nevertheless had a fundamental influence on the development of […]
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Living artistically with paradigm crises, part 1
Everybody makes mistakes. Some “mistakes” are not mistakes. Sometimes they are entirely logical extensions of political, religious, or academic doctrines that used to yield dependable results. When we become aware of our cognitive biases and preconceptions, how do we decide which to keep? Far more intriguing and useful is the concept of multiple truths that […]
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The One and Only Original, 2nd ed.
Seven hundred pages of research and note-taking later, I was floored by déjà vu. As George Santayana’s epigram scolds, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (qtd. in The Culture of the Copy 271). The repetition was this: I wrote on the relative merits of originality and duplication in art almost […]
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Book reviews
I was recently asked about the top three ideas or theories from this year’s massive pile of academic reading. #1 “…since no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines and since no two paradigms leave all the same problems unsolved, paradigm debates always involve the question: Which problems is it more significant to have […]
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More recursion
It’s time to present another eclectic batch of artworks that question assumptions and generally inspire imagination. Simon Stalenhag’s illustrations present a divergent version of the eighties. The Swedish artist provides the alternative reality’s historical summary in a review of his work in WIRED. In this case, each digital illustration combines elements of white, middle-class […]
Colleen Wampole 