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.