insomnia is my productivity

I love sleeplessness even as it decreases my quality of life.

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I have been trying to qualify in text the concerns of my current work.
how does this sound? This is taken from what i hope will be the next draft of my thesis - written this week:


After conceptual art, after post conceptual painting (richter) what does one do?

Is it possible to maintain a 100 percent commitment to painting and at the same time have the work engage in a conceptual dialog with art history?

The work is discursive in that it attempts to engage through its conception and construction in a dialogical way with art history. It is also discursive in that it is comprised of elements which themselves are in dialog with one another although they may come from different historical painting sites.

My current practice is equaly invested in a conceptual practice and a very traditional painting practice.

I say “very traditional” because in order for the conceptual structure I am engaged with to function, I need to engage in the normative conditions of production and display. The robust functionality of my conceptual practice also requires a high level of output or productivity.

The conceptual apparatus I am enagaged with has to do with engaging painting as a discursive site where I can both fall in love with and interrogate the functionality of traditional painting practice.
The paintings I make are conceptual interrogations in that they are constructed by the continuous layering of lexical components which, themselves, refer to specific paitning histories. Through a quasi-Deridian layering, whereby each successive layer cancels out the first by centering itself in the field of perception, the lexical painterly elements at play in my work vie for dominance and create an aesthetic painterly entity.

This aesthetic proposition of painterly object/ idea object that is both a declarative statement about painting and the need for pleasure, and the visual iteration of an affirmative negation ala Adorno creates its own viewing imperative.

This project, despite the various painterly referents at play has little or nothing to do with expressionism. The conditions of production are such that the work, by nature of the aesthetic studio practice, looks like it does…. But this is a symptom of the need for the work and the practice to be viewed in tandem. When it comes to the display of work, a greater understanding of the works relationship to paitning history can be understood through a presentation that highlights the geneology or inter-relatedness of the work.

The paintings are made by continuous hybridization of the various lexical elements that are in play at any given moment in my practice. Currently there are about a dozen or so elements that are in the paintings: a specific type of gestural mark, a blurring mark, a gradiant, a color field, a loose (de-structured) grid, stripes made with tape that are made to look badly made, large single stripes that attempt to tie up the paintings like packaging, and nominally random stenciling made by echoing the loose grid mentioned above with tape and then covering it with a solid color and then removing the tape-stencil.

These elements, through their continuous recombination, create a narrative of structure. This narrative is non-linear and has more to do with a poetic structure than a story structure (to stay with narrative for a moment). However, the “words” or “sentences” that construct this narrative are not language but rather are the structural painting elements as I have laid out above. These “linguistic” elements are indexical in structure, but only refer back to their painting histories and themselves so that the narrative content of the work gets pushed onto the viewer and forces or at the very least, encourages vigorously, the associative power of what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the “Imaging Consciousness”, that is to say, the aspect of human mental experience that reads images into everything; a crack in the sidewalk is a face, a cloud is a whale or a palace, etc….

This push, onto the viewer, by the painting/painter is not an abdication of responsibility or authority, but rather, where the work becomes political, and links back, through its painterly construction, to the conceptual apparatus defined before. By forcing the viewer into the associate territory of the imaging consciousness, I hope to cause overwhelming visual pleasure. This pleasure, through its stubborn insistence on itself, causes the work, through opposition to take on political characteristics. This theoretical work (to paraphrase Yves-Alain Bois, theoretical work of which painting is the stake) asserts itself as political by asserting a hermetic (non-overtly) political identity, but one which engages the world through opposition and by way of this opposition assumes political characteristics.

Notes on Negation

This is a response to a note from Kristen:

"The market obliterates the possibility of work within it to deal with the problems of people." Or at least makes it very, very difficult! I agree with you and your description of your feelings and decisions related to your practice are similar to mine. The question for me, and which I think your concerns implicitly raise, is what to do and more particularly why to do it within the site of art.

I suppose my interest in art lies at the intersection of my hope at what I imagine the social space of art could be and my disappointment at what it is and seems to have great difficulty of escaping; expressive cliché, grotesque commodification, hermetic professionalism. But then why should it be different from any other institution?

Regardless, I am interested in taking up the problems of art because I think the social site of art has been and can be a unique (but not privileged) site of (ethical) social engagement. In order to do so it must operate on different terms than those fashion production and market exchange and hermetic historicism. The way I am choosing to do this is through what I suppose I would call utopian negation. Negation because I am increasingly looking to make art by not making it and utopian because hope is the only justifiable motive to engage this space; and hope seems to me utopian, romantic and naive.

I think about how someone like Richter engages art. His practice is paradoxical by design in that it is based on a negation of painting through the physical act of painting. Richter proclaims a profound commitment to the "idiotic" practice of painting (putting paint on a surface) while simultaneously demonstrating and articulating a rejection of what painting is capable of. In a sense I guess I would say that Richter simultaneously makes and unmakes painting by being a painter.

For a long time I was concerned with attacking art and sought to define my practice in negative terms, "its photography that is not... Its not this or that.." I am no longer interested in making things whose energy lies in what it is not but rather in conceiving ways to make my practice, whether it is understood as art or not, something useful.

The metaphor I often use of moving the velvet rope further and further away from the institution may ultimately result in me deciding the site of art is not the site where I want my work to register. I hope not, but maybe....