kollektief

i’ve been thinking about jobs and things, they seem an almost necessary element of creating. it helps so much to have a distraction that you can pull yourself away from to work on art, or i guess a time of being made to concentrate on something else so that things start to bubble up inside of you until they force themselves out later. it feels easy to get stuck in a rut when trying to work constantly on making things. i guess i’m saying that making art the job has its pitfalls.

and this has me trying to figure out what is the normal mode of human existence, what’s the primary relationship with working and thinking? is farming an ideal? a mixture of lots of work sometimes and not a lot of work at other times, largely self-paced within an externally determined unforgiving structure?

i seem to have so little real time at the moment. which makes no sense, given that nearly all my time is mine. i am attributing it to the large amount of time i spend sleeping and getting ready to sleep. too bad i can’t set up shop in my dreams. or maybe it’s a good thing. i’d have no time there either. dreams have been engaging lately.

with the extra day, february seems to just drag on. the bread and circus of politics has become rash forming. i always wondered if, once i got away from mit, i would turn into one of those people who really kept up with politics. it’s happened a little bit, but not a lot. i’m chalking it up to the strange allure of google news.

i’ve been listening to the music from the woman who threw that loft party two weekends ago. she has a great song called ‘people‘, with the opening line ‘there’s people on medication all over this town’. listen for the backing vocals intoning ‘paxil, zoloft, prozac, lithium’.

my war with the flies here is never-ending.

eventually i will have the eloquent wherewithall to respond to Hilda’s elevated question. In the meantime…

i hate you receptacle – once i knew you as a power outlet, now i see you as the pain you are.  no matter how hard i try to place you, you will always be about 6″ away from where somebody wants you.

i just felt the need to exhitionistically share my frustration.

Instead of asking what does art mean, I’m much more interested to know what it means to you personally. What is so important about art that some people spend gazillions on it either purchasing it or creating it. Sure, you can create it without a single cent, I am more of that inclination. Is it about the ideas behind it, the messages it conveys in front of it? The striking juxtapositions, the subtleties, implications, the nothingness and everythingness of it, texture, color… what floats your boat?

nice interview with susan hockfield, she’s still so much more human than chuck vest. there’s a really reassuring bit where she talks about her personal scientific interests.

so i don’t get all the trash people dump on nader, like he’s some kind of buzz-kill for the real democrats. not to get all political, but… to get all political, h. clinton claims that if it weren’t for him we’d have had al gore as president, like all those people were voting for nader just because he got in their way of voting for al gore. wasn’t there a reason those people voted for him? and isn’t it most likely the fact that al gore didn’t become president that we’ve got such an interesting and unusual pair of democratic candidates running for the nomination? the fact that the pimple of american politics has come to a disgusting head might actually be a good thing in the long run.

ps sorry for the radio silence from me, i’m just getting my head back in order from a rather hectic february.

a mystery piece. if a voo doo submission, possibly the least funny submission(?) i’ve ever seen. i’m completely baffled by it. it ended up in my possession after i took an old pad of bristol board from a stack of submissions/old stuff and this ended up in the back somehow. so i scanned it and white/black balanced it… and here it is.

any clues? any ideas? if a submission, why the HELL is this funny? it looks like someone spent so much time doing this, and yet, such a waste of time (if humor is what they were after)

edit: so apparently there was an Elastic Charles project at the ML, but it was a hypermedia thing and not any sort of paper thing.

it could be (more or less correctly) argued that the first big animated movie wasn’t disney after all.  thank god.  think, rather, “prince achmed“.  paper cutouts and a lightbox, and three years.  dear god.  took me months to speak my piece:

like trees, we grow up to be satellites

and that was barely more than a minute of sharpie and paper, drawn on an old windowpane (later stepped on and shattered) over a bare bulb.  we don’t do things high tech here at chez kenney.  but man, there’s something about cut paper, something requiring a delicacy and patience that’s hard for me to understand.  some of it takes me all the way back to preschool, not just in materials but in sheer bright exuberance:

speaking of shadow puppets, only the dalang gets to see how indonesian shadow puppets (those featured in wayang kulit) are painted.   in a way, nothing’s hidden:  you can see the rods.  there’s no shame in strings.  but that isn’t the whole of it.  private art, like private lies.  i’ll keep all your secrets for you, child.

lotte reiniger never did stop using silhouettes.

hey, does anybody still want to start up a book discussion club? we could do it online (we could do it on a boat)!

also, zoz pointed out to me that there isn’t any good way to keep track of comments and postings that you haven’t yet read, however the next best thing is, if you click on Site Admin, in the dashboard there’s a list of the latest activity on the page. that way you don’t always have to manually check over previous postings to see if there’s any new comments.

we could discuss it over goat! i am in boston this weekend!

So I’m finally getting around to applying for a Xeric grant to self-publish a comic, and, man, I’m intimidated! I think that I’m just really bad at actually finishing things, you know? This is something I’ve been saying I would do for years now, though, so I can’t stop now, I guess. 3.5 pages left to finish and then covers/introduction. I talked to someone who had won the prize a few years back, and he suggested budgeting in for promotional materials, etc, and to have a very finished product to show them. This means I have to have a budget to show them and a plan for marketing and and and and. I’m really nervous!

In other news, I’ve been sort of working of Elizabeth Streb doing set design stuff. But, more, just consulting work. I feel like the strange middle man. And I often feel rather useless and that I’m going to get found out as a fake or something weird like that. However… I realized… I’m the only person there who can do math. No joke. However, the two week deadline she wanted for what she wanted is totally unrealistic, so she’s getting the best I could find that already existed and I will work on making them what she wants.

I had this realization the other night that I keep trying to find “real” things (i.e. jobs) to do because I just can’t accept the fact that I’m really just an artist and that I’m trying to make that work as a sort of career. I doubt my ability to hold any real job, because as soon as I get an idea of what to work on, I want to go work on it. The world doesn’t generally tolerate flakiness and fickleness. However, I’ve made 6 paintings in the new year, and I’m really gonna try and get a show sometime soon. Also, the applying for the grant falls under this. And maybe residencies or something in the future. I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve been really productive lately. At least, in my own definition of productive.

heavy metal machine

i admit it: i have a soft spot for twisted metal. and i don’t think i’d mind a room with huge steel Soviet boundaries like the one above – though unlike the original in dem Kunsthaus Tacheles, i suspect i’d put glass panels between the letters for heating purposes. seriously, though, there’s something about combining building and word that i find really alluring. used to live in the poetry room on tetazoo, walls covered in words, and sometimes i still think i’d like to make something like that, only aesthetically better. but the word as architecture: that’s…

…well, it’s an idea i’d be playing with if i had any kind of decent space to work in.  alas; i seem currently unable to draw anything except death as a rabbit.  in any case, i spent a while staring at the twisted metal, wondering how the hell they got the sprues to work, but apparently there’s a 3D printing process where you can use a steel-bronze composite and print your metal sculpture. somehow it seems like cheating to me, you know? bastards get to sit in front of a computer: no coming into the foundry at weird hours to dip your wax in the ceramic/sand stuff, no suiting up in leather and trying not to drop molten iron on your feet. easy and dull. fat and weak. and yeah, i’m sure i’d be singing a different song, were that my job, but man.

we can print things in metal! it is the fucking future! holy shit!

is the clean’s tally-ho!

Also I’m hoping to be in Boston late Wednesday night, and be around for nearly a week. There should be hanging out and music playing.

super self-referential european waste baskets….

http://www.cairo.fr/

and i never had any particular interest or desire in being an architect. .. but somehow i seem to have ended up in it – and i haven’t attacked a chunk of clay in months and months… but i just finished photographing my like 2 month immensely expensive cork model of a dull estate in washington dc – so i thought i’d share how dull architecture can be (though i find the topo lines rather exciting)

Model post-shipping… fuck. Shoulda, coulda woulda braced it more, labeled it more, prayed more. damnit. at least the model itself is really ok… the case is just destroyed… ugh. crappy day all around.

lebbeus woods NYC

when i was little, my parents thought i was gonna grow up to be an architect. that didn’t happen, but there’s still that, that, that something about buildings, especially en masse. that there picture up above reminds me of some projects i did when i still had access to a clay studio – taking a block of clay, beating the fuck out of it, and then slowly, with surgical precision, carving a city out. and not just a city, but an underworld, fossils and tunnels and subways and bunkers… there was a book i read as a kid – and at this very moment i am trying frantically to find it on the internets, but looking for terms like “book city illustrated” is fruitless – that portrayed something of the same sense, but done in gorgeous translucent watercolors, following the city through the course of the day. but the level of detail, the precision, spaces and places for each and every thing… ah, but i’m running off at the mouth. pretty picture. above.

very, very infrequently, i get hungry for corndogs. now is one of those unfortunate times. pity me.

Here goes my first attempt at a post on this new-fangled “weblo” thing.

Last week I finally got around to watching “Helvetica”, which as the name suggests is a documentary on the typeface that can be found everywhere from corporate logos to emergency exits to corporate logos to the photo credits in certain editions of HowToGAMIT to corporate logos. Besides branding the viewer as a design dork the picture does a good job of staying engaging all the way through and not letting itself drag on too long in any individual phase (or in its entirety, clocking in at a svelte 80 minutes). The structure is basically interviews with typographers and designers intercut with shots of Helvetica on the street showing its ubiquity. For me it was great to see people like Hermann Zapf (who designed my favourite book-text serif font, Palatino) and Stefan Sagmeister get the opportunity to be on the star side of the lens, and I enjoyed seeing both the pithy things everyone had to say about Helvetica and imagining what the entire interviews must have been like before they selected the bits to actually grant screen time. I think it would have been a fun picture to make on a kind of pleasingly dry topic.

I have to say that despite using Helvetica since I first learned how to do desktop publishing, I hadn’t really thought much about where it came from and what my opinions were towards its prominence — to me it’s a utilitarian typeface that’s by no means my preferred sans serif for its own shapeliness (that would be Futura) that serves admirably for getting the point across, which is where I agree with the modernists, but at the same time I disagree with them that the relationship of typefaces to text should be akin to that of grain neutral spirit to gin — there are plenty of instances where the mood of a design is (and should be) conveyed by the form of the type as well as the content. And I certainly have little but contempt for the postmodernist dicks who think they’re doing something bold and edgy by laying out an entire document in Zapf Dingbats just because they personally didn’t like the content of the piece. So it was a lot of fun for me to toss these arguments back and forth over the course of the picture, giving form to my opinions that had never found the need to be molded into an expressible shape before.

Here’s the IMDB URL, more for my own interest in whether this is all you have to do to include a link in this wordpress thing than the belief that I’m saving anyone any time by not making them type ‘Helvetica’ into the IMDB search field:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0847817/

If you have a free hour and twenty minutes to kill, you could do worse than check this out — I think it has something to appeal to most people here, whether for love of design, love of international signage, or love of German people getting excited about their relationship with rules.

Update: Aha! There is more to making the links work than just pasting them in.

2nd update: Now I’ve gone crazy with the links.  It’s unleashed a monster.  I’m smoothage!! I’m smoothage!!!  However I do want to draw your attention to one sentence from Hermann Zapf’s Wikipedia page: “Unfortunately, just before the project was completed, Siegel wrote a letter to Zapf, saying that his girlfriend had left him, and that he had lost all interest in anything.”