30 November: dreams about drawing.
Today I received a flattened foxhead in the mail.
It is an artist's submission for our drawing room call for art and exhibit, SPLIT, happening in December 2007 in Maine.
I was both shocked, horrified, and fascinated by its lifelike quality, its resemblance to my own cats, its nicely preserved fur and colorings, uber real, without eyes or teeth, and a black button nose, flat. Inside the triangular book which it covers, is a text written in a foxy brown ink. I haven't read the book all yet, but I saw references to roadkill and transformation. How does this piece relate to SPLIT, I wondered. Is it merely the splitting of text, or the severing of a head from its body. Really, the most unusual mail art I have ever received.

This is an example of why when there are fewer rules and driected guidelines, there are less expectations, and people feel more free to explore, experiment, and they become more open to the possibilities of self-expression. One does not have to make art that looks like art, rather, one makes work to delve into some unchartered territory, and it becomes a way to respond to ones surroundings and ones feeling. I think this piece, which admittedly I wanted to discredit somehow at first, is growing on me as a compelling response to the theme, provocative and certainly, laden with meaning. Thank you artist, for inviting a range of feelings to surface, for the simplicity and complexity of this work, and for taking risks on so many levels.

roadkill
animal human relations
animal as fur
animal rights
animal as resiurces and useful material
commodity
vanity
speed
highways
car culture
SUV's
boundaries/territories
our disregard for nature/our craving to domiate nature/our carelessness
our awe of nature/our fear of nature/ our passion for nature
our constructions of nature
our constructions or what nature is
our ambivalence

27 November: heavy sleep, heavy rain.

Collecting, what is the impulse to gather, accumulate, amass and store things.
Collecting is related to collecting, collating, assembling, order, disorder, chaos, presentation, shelving, display, content, production, reproduction, economics, information, language, property, possessing, power, sovereignty, ownership, territory, bounadries, identity, things, thingness, stuff, junk, having, memory, trace, nostalgia, loss, desire, fear, waste, elimination, categorization, sacred and profane, materiality, diversity,decay, fantasy, circulation, circuitousness, exchange, give and take, the gift, association, autobiographical, political, geographical, environmental, religious, social, temperal, indeterminate, ephemeral,remants, parts,external, internal, cultural,preference, projection, self-creation, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, interchange, multiples, orginal, authenticity, orgins, longing, space, time, arranegment, installation, identification, classification, series,contradictions, difference, simliarity, artifacts, relics, scraps, remains, archives, label, stacking, surface, value, power object, aesthetics, index, model, matrix, objects, intimacy, communication, paradox, meaning,ambivalence, simultaneity, continuity, discontinuity,frameworks, sybmology, symbols, mythology, stand-in, personification, links, existence, humanity, transformation,evidence, testimony, absence, presence, reflection,history, legacy, fragment, texture, construction,heterogenity, homogeniety, icons, strategies, composition, interpretation, found objects, mnemonic, experience, control, articulation, extension, practice,mortality, immortality, transition, the metaphysical, place, the melancholic, process, death, life,
......to be continued

food

25 November: no dreams.


Our food reveals much about our relationship with our bodies, ourselves, animals, nature, as well as our relationship to one another, our cravings, and our squeamishness. We create specific associations, we draw lines between sacred and profane, we establish rules and codes of behavior that conform to our categories of clean and unclean to avoid contamination, disease, and death.

Does a sacred cow save us from our mortality. Can peeling our fruit bridge the gap of horror, can we temproraily stave off the formlessness that we are thorugh the separtion of an outer layer, a crusty, brown-patched, cadaverish skin from the inner smooth, juicy, expansive, pink flesh.

The scared does not exist without the profane, and in fact, they are interchangeable. This is difficult to accpet, because it means that there cannot be a difference, and the catgories are facades. Our human identity is shaped by fears and desire.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas

24 November: woke up from a dream about poodles that were the size of thumbs, brown ones.

Read some Gertie Stein this am. Read the food section. "The change the dirt, not to change dirt means that there is no beefsteak and not to have that is no obstruction, it is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to see the difference." (Roastbeef, Food, Tender Buttons)

Gertie really uses writing as form, content, and context, she explains what she does in a way in her piece compositon as explanation. She asserts she is beginning agian and again. In Composition as Explanation, Stein expresses the cycling of everything, implying that appearances are unreliable, andthat which is most reliable is change.

We generate meaning by our acceptance or refusal, she asserts, of our experience of something, which is sublimated by our assumptions. Gertie uses our assumptions of writing and reading to her advantage, and we slip and slide around in her slathery verbal meanderings. She really enjoys walking the dog, Batch II. The outlaw she writes of is herself, and we could be outlaws too, if we let go of what is rigidly accepted and adhered to, to locate a new experience of something, and one which might be fascinating, enthralling, liberating, wonderful.

Gertie's inversions turn writing on its head, she makes it into a meal or a passionate kiss.