ON RE-EXAMINATION OF ART

earlier today i was discussing the similarities/differences in art and music with my like-minded, but more musically oriented friend. He has been doing electronic compositions, working with sounds from an abstract perspective, and arranging them in 8 separate surround-sound channels. When listening to an electronic music concert, i was emmersed in 360 degrees of sound, responding both aurally and spacially. We discussed how music traditionally is viewed passively, from one direction (much like a painting, you cannot move around it). He told me that modern/contemporary music was moving more towards this idea of emmersion. To me, this hits on my excitement about sculpture and installation, how it is an attempt to create a more complex dialog with the viewer, to basically say to the viewer, "Hey, I exist in this world, too!" While i probably should have guessed it, it was interesting to learn that similar changes in our perception of art have taken place across disciplines, i.e. music and visual art. Of course, theater has been experimenting with it since Shakespeare, or earlier, has it not? It would be fun to chronicle this interdisciplinary movement through history (a paper....?)

Collage=Art=Collage

I've become attracted to the concept of collage and its manifestations. Some of my influences have been Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, and Dada artists such as Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann.

Some of my recent work has included a "video collage" of animated mechanical devices, and a current serious of light boxes constructed of found wood in the sculpture studio and the simple wiring of light fixtures. I've always (in terms of my maturity as an artist) been drawn to the found object, and i'm starting to see it's effect on my work as I look at my portfolio.

I'm tentatively adopting a philosophy of the collage and how it relates to all art. The collage/photomontage/assemblage is a composition of images, text, found objects, and photographs, coalesced into one "universe" i should say. My proposal is that all art is a form of collage of the mind, where the addition, arrangement, and juxtaposition of images, objects, (memories), ideas, etc., drawn from the library (or palette) of one's own consciousness.

I challenge anyone to contradict this definition of art, as I feel I can justify it infinitely.

On Readymades

"since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage."

-Marcel Duchamp
Apropos of "Readymades" 1961

Like a comic book

you know, if you scroll down, the photographs seem to have a narrative quality. I dare someone to write a story about.

trainyard

self indulgence

prison

machine

helmet

gunsight

fiesoleh

boboli

android