You can't always vend what you want

12/29/2007
Socrates Sculpture Park Proposal
Status: Rejected

To Whom It May Concern:

This project is submitted for your consideration as a proposal for all three of Socrates’ available awards. I wish to re-purpose a vending machine, like the kind that you see for the dispensing of snacks, for the distribution of a catalogue depicting several works that are the result of a collaborative project directed by myself.
The project is this: I will contact other artists, one at a time, to accompany me on a walk around New York or a neighboring area, perhaps even limiting the area to Long Island City. The location can be chosen by either person individually or together. While on the walk the artists pick up articles and objects they find that interest them en route and save them. Once the walk is completed the artists collaboratively assemble the objects and articles they’ve picked to create a work of art that is sculptural by nature. I’m tentitively calling these sculptures “constitutionals”.
The catalogue of these projects will have photos of the assemblages accompanied by a map detailing the route taken and any notes or comments about the conversation or ideas had between the other artist and myself. The catalogues will be printed in different sizes and shapes using an online publisher and be placed inside the vending machine for public purchase. The cost of each book will be equivalent to the cost of its production, and the money will be used to print a replacement. The machine, which retails at $2,599.00 is 72" High, 33" Wide, 27.5" Deep and approximately 375 Pounds, will be equiped with some type of attatched roof for weatherproofing. The sides of the machine may be equiped with shelving to display some or all of the sculptures in the catalogue.
A variety of issues surface with this project. I’m not interested in commenting on the comodification of art, or the ubiquitous “market”. This project is more about questioning the nature of sculpture, exhibition, presentation/display, distribution, and accessibility. It is about turning articles used for the collection of capital, in the case of the vending machine, into instruments of socialism. And articles of detritus, in the case of the found “trash” for the sculptures, into instruments of beauty that are a representation of a collective effort. This project could be considered a bit dangerous when words like “socialism” and “collectivism” are used to describe it, but I also think that those two words are precisely what America and American art could do with a little more of.
I’m very excited about this project and it can only be completed with the help of organizations like Socrates. I hope you find it exciting too; and let me know if you feel like going for a walk.

Sincerely,

Ryan Sullivan


The images below are two "constitutionals" created in this way. The collaborator is Thuridur Ros Sigurthorsdottir.

After this proposal was submitted I was pleased to find some information supporting the idea.
In a click opera entry of 2/20/2008 Nick Currie talks about "Strollology". An apparently legitimate science of walking. He found this on Wikipedia:

'German Wikipedia tells me that strollology is a perfectly serious science founded by the late political economist, sociologist, art historian and planning theorist Lucius Burckhardt in the 1980s at the University of Kassel. Also called Spaziergangswissenschaft (knowledge about moving through space), it deals with human perception and its feedback into planning and building.

"We are conducting a new science," Burckhardt explained to Hans-Ulrich Obrist in the preface to his book Why is Landscape Beautiful? "It's founded on the idea that the environment is normally not perceived, and if it is, it tends to be in terms of the observer's preconceived ideas. The classic walk goes to the city limits, the hills, the lake, the cliffs. But walkers also traverse parking lots, suburbs, settlements, factories, wastelands, highway intersections on their way to meadows, moors, farms. Coming home, when the walker tells what he has seen he tends to speak only of the forest and the lake, the things he set out to see, the things he read about, had geographical knowledge of, or saw in brochures and pictures. He leaves out the factory and the dump. Strollology deals not only with these prefabricated ideal images, but with the reality they eliminate." '

Even though I know that applying for things is a crap shoot I still get that "what wasn't good enough? What am I doing wrong?" feeling when those rejection letters come back. I feel like this project is interesting and challenging. Am I the only one aside from a few friends that feels this way?
The older you get the more you begin to realize that the social constructs you experienced in high school never really go away. Cliques are a part of human nature. As a social species we need each other. But we only really need a certain amount of each other. Cliques are a kind of mental utopia. And that utopia can contain as many or as few as desired, as long as everyone is thinking in a similar manner. A letter of rejection can make you feel like the kid no one wants to sit by at lunch. This is amplified when "lunch" is the art world and the kids are all other artists. Weren't we the ones everyone thought was weird? Now we are turning around and doing it to each other?
That's how I felt at first, but now I know better. It's naive to think that being creative is equal to being alienated. But I think ultimately success comes down to how many people would want to "take a walk" with you.

Introduction to a metathesis

I am using the format of the blog for a thesis. The blog format encourages dissemination. The blog is open to collective constants through the ability for anyone to comment on what is said at any time rather than the traditional review period of an individual vision. I don’t believe in separating art forms. What I write about and how it is written I consider in creative terms to be art as well. The thesis is an open framework. Something that is constantly being added to and edited, changing over time just like the art it references. I have chosen to write entries that are self-contained. Each entry has something to do with the other but are individual moments. In this way I have shown what in my art practice is a very important thread, the macro/micro concept of something being read as itself and as a connector to a greater self. Things close up and far away are at once dissimilar and compatible.
My work deals with issues of marginality, structure analysis, multiple meaning, and style diversion. I am attracted to the cast off and overlooked.
It is my practice to view things metathetically. When visual constants representing everyday reality (perspective, depth perception, light direction) are viewed as instances of meaning rather than absolutes reality itself becomes a tool. With this an understanding of Cartesian approaches to what is considered real is offset. I often manipulate the make-up of visual signifiers, often referencing (art) history, to generate a terminal in which the viewer freely draws lines of meaning. By staging events in Synesthetic environments and mixed cultural sites my pieces are permitted to express the state in which people, Places, and the elements are transitory. People see sounds, still lives coalesce with their surroundings, and thoughts, structures, and organisms are interchangeable.

love notes

Romanticism between 1790-1830.

“what I see first of all in Romanticism is the effect of a profound change, not primarily in belief, but in the spatial projection of reality. This in turn leads to a different localizing of the various levels of that reality. The drunken boat: the revolutionary element in romanticism. Northrop Frye p. 5

---aristotelian thinking---connection to nature—the sublime

From a tumul of anguished doubts, new convictions, which could not be reduced to simple formulai, began to emerge-belief in the primacy of imagination, the potentialities of intuition, the importance of the emotions and emotional integrity, and, above all, the uniqueness and unique value of every human being in a constantly changing cosmos.
Romanticism Hugh Honour pg.21 1979 Harper & Row.

-aesthetics move to the forefront, mimesis replaced by expressiveness.

-after appropriation, which is a kind of mimesis, of romantic imagery i.e. animals in nature etc. we have a representation of dissolution. The mimetic romanticism is more a yearning or call to romantic modes of thought rather than a conjuring statement of them. This is because most of the imagery is either nostalgic old thrifty paintings or or mass produced, like clip art, or flattened like Ryan Mcguiness’.

1755 Dr. Johnson defines Romantick (sic) as:’resembling the tales or romances; wild…improbable; false…;fanciful; full of wild scenery.’

--romanticism as transcendental decorative painting as meditative mandala.
-transcendental pantheism

Blakes myth of Urizen the sky god is a fuller and more sophisticated version of the myth of Frankenstein. In Europe. W. blake.



Quotations from: Romanticism Reconsidered selected papers from the English institute
1963 Columbia University Press:

The Drunken Boat by Northrop Frye

“It is obvious that in pre Romantic poetry there is a strong affinity with the attitude that we have called sense. The poet, in all ages and cultures, prefers images to abstractions, the sensational to the conceptual. But the pre-Romantic structure of imagery belonged to a nature which was the work of God; the design in nature was, as Sir Thomas Browne calls it, the art of God; nature is thus an objective structure or system for the poet to follow.”

“Rousseau represents, and to some extent made, a revolutionary change in the modern attitude…in his assumption that civilization was a purely human artifact, something that man had made, could unmake, could subject to his own criticism, and was at all times entirely responsible for. Above all, it was something for which the only known model was in the human mind…The effect of such an assumption is twofold. First, it puts the arts in the center of civilization. The basis of civilization is now the creative power of man; its model is the human vision revealed in the arts. Second, this model, as well as the sources of creative power, are now located in the mind’s internal heaven, the external world being seen as a mirror reflecting and making visible what is within. Thus the ‘outside’ world, most of which is ‘up there,’ yields importance and priority to the inner world, in fact derives its poetic significance at least from it. ‘In looking at objects of Nature,’ says Coleridge in the Notebooks, ‘I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.’… Hence the emphasis is not on what we have called sense, but on the constructive power of the mind, where reality is brought into being by experience…Romantic poets sought to defy external reality by creating a uniformity of tone and mood…Such a poetic technique is , psychologically, akin to magic, which also aims at bringing spiritual forces into reality through concentration on a certain type of experience.” P. 10,11


-characters become psychological projections and the setting a period in the past just recent enough to be re-created rather than empirically studied. P. 11,12

Keats : “Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbor… and Humanity… would become a grand democracy of trees!” p. 13

Blake’s Vehicular Form- that which carries the message in metaphor usually: frequently it is an image of a boat being driven by a breeze or current. See Shelley’s Ode and the figure of the “correspondent breeze”.

-the myth typically is a story of a god who's character lays within the human as well as non-human worlds.( axis)

“I have remarked elsewhere that the romance,, in its most naive and primitive form, is an endless sequence of adventures, terminated only by the author’s death or disgust.” P.16

English Romanticism by M.H. Abrams from Romanticism Reconsidered

“the Romantic period was eminently an age obsessed with the fact of violent and inclusive change,” referencing Hazlitt p.28

“Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.”
The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (Dublin, 1881), p. 52
M.H. p.31

"The formative age of Romantic poetry was clearly one of the apocalyptic expectation, or at least apocalyptic imaginings,” p. 37

It’s a common misconception that Romanticism is often described as a mode of escapism. The poets were obsessed with the realities of their era.

“ Whatever the form, the Romantic Bard is one “who present, past, and future sees”; so that in dealing with current affairs his procedure is often panoramic, his stage cosmic, his agents quasi-mythological, and his logic of events apocalyptic. Typically this mode of Romantic vision fuses history, politics, philosophy, and religion into one grand design, by asserting Providence-or some form of natural teleology-to operate in the seeming chaos of human history so as to effect from present evil a greater good…from which will emerge a new man on a new earth which is a restored paradise.” P.46

The Fate of pleasure by Lionel Trilling in Romanticism Reconsidered

“This we of our time can quite understand. We are repelled by the idea of an art that is consumer-directed and comfortable, let alone luxurious. Our typical experience of a work which will eventually have authority with us is to begin our relation to it at a conscious disadvantage, and to wrestle with until it consents to bless us. We express our high esteem for such a work by supposing that it judges us. And when it no longer does seem to judge us, or when it no longer baffles and resists us, when we begin to feel that we possess it, we discover that its power is diminished.” P. 89

Romanticism Re-Examined by Rene Wellek from Romanticism Reconsidered

Morse Peckham introduces “negative romanticism” despairing, nihilistic romanticism

Peckham influenced by Ernest Tuveson’s The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (1960)

“Reading Peckham, one is tempted to give up the problem in despair. We might come to agree with Lovejoy or even with Valery, who warns us that it ‘is impossible to think seriously with words such as Classicism, Romanticism, Humanism, or Realism. One cannot get drunk or quench one’s thirst with labels on a bottle.’ But of course these terms are not labels: they have a range of meaning very different from Pabst Blue Ribbon or Liebfrauenmilch. Modern logicians tell us that all definitions are berbal, that they are ‘stipulated’ by the speaker. We certainly cannot prevent Communists from calling dictatorship ‘popular democracy,’ a baby from calling any strange man ‘daddy,’ or even Phckham from calling romanticism ‘Enlightenment.’ But ‘there is a sense’- I am quoting Wilbur Urban-‘in which the distinction between verbal and real definition is a valid one. There comes a point at which variation ceases to be merely inconvenient and unpragmatic; it becomes unintelligible. It leads to contadictio in adjecto, in which intrinsic incompatibility between subject and predicate destroys the meaning by an implicit denial.’

Urban quote from the intelligible world (New York, 1929), p. 124
P. 111, 112

German Romanticism operated more with dichotomies, thesis and antithesis

Max Deutschbein, in Das Wesen des Romantischen Coethen,(1921)
Aims at a phenomenological intuition of the essence of Romanticism by showing the agreement between English and German Romanticism in their concept and use of the synthetic imagination: the union of opposites, the finite and infinite, eternity and temporality, universality and individuality. The scheme serves the conclusion that English poetry translated German theory into practice,…this neglected little book has stressed one central and valid concept: the reconciling, synthetic imagination as the common denominator of Romanticism.” P. 113


Adolf Grimme, in Vom Wesen der Romantik Braunschweig, 1947 defines Romanticism as a breakthrough of what he calls “the vegetative strata of the soul” : the preconscious rather than the subconscious. The preconscious includes the imagination, which is raised to consciousness by Romanticism.” P. 117

Jesuit Philosopher Romano Guardini comes to a similar conclusion: Romanticism is ‘an upsurge of the unconscious and primitive.’p. 11 7
“Erscheinung und Wesen der Romantik,” in Romantik: Ein Zyklus Tubinger Vorlesungen, ed. Theodor Steinbuchel (Tubingen, 1948), pp. 237-49.

lines

My art making practice is ecotonal. Ecotones are areas of transition between different adjacent ecological communities. If we consider mediums to function as ecological communities then the matrix functions as the terrain (and the artist is the ecotone). This is our definition of a world. According to Wikipedia: "Ecotones are particularly significant for mobile animals, as they can exploit more than one set of habitats within a short distance. This can produce an edge effect along the boundary line, with the area displaying a greater than usual diversity of species." Diverse species are dissimilar organisms. If we look at objects from a Hylozoic point of view they are organisms. The concept of objectification may be moot. I like the analogy of the mobile animal in reference to the artist. The mobility may be more mental than say a Geselle or journeyman but no less active.
I use the moniker woodcliffe. It's a bardic name. Woodcliffe is the name of the street that I grew up on in Lancaster, Ohio. It was an appropriate title. Behind our house was a large stretch of woods and in front was the street that led right into the center of town. In her book Color: A Natural History of the Palette Victoria Finlay tells us about traveling Glaziers. When a new cathedral was in the finishing stages Glaziers would arrive to create the stained glass windows. Townspeople, often suspicious of strangers, were particularly wary of these traveling artisans because they would camp out by or in the forests or woods near the town. They did this in order to be close to the fuel supply for the furnaces they would build to heat and make the glass. The edge of the woods is an ecotone between the wild and civilization. These artists lived on that edge, the cliff of the woods.
I feel as though I exist there too.



yet to be titled 2007, Marys 2006, yet to be titled 2006 © R. Sullivan

windows through the soul

Paul Klee's work has been said to have created, through its pictographic forms, a mythology outside and beyond any one, or particular culture. His forms are variable, archetypal, and have multiple meanings. The simplicity of Klee's forms allows for a complex ambiguity. Simplifying forms like the human figure or structures into basic signifiers provides freedom and openess. When there is abstraction there is more possibility or potential for viewer participation; because the work isn't based within a context of illusion but representation. Simplified or symbolic forms have traditionally been referred to as "primitive". I was taught in school that Medieval art looked the way it did(flat and disproportionate) because it was made in the "dark ages"; people were uneducated barbarians who weren't sophisticated enough to deal with perspective. This is lazy thinking. The middle ages were a time of "reformation". The church was avidly trying to convert pagan peoples. Force isn't the most effective or Christian way of doing this(although obviously not always the way chosen) so what's left is the appropriation of key events, dates, styles, etc. Most people know that this is why in Catholicism Christmas is around the winter solstice. Light festivals in nature religions during the darkest time of year conveniently fit into the Christian idea of Jesus as the light of the world. Nature religions are just what they sound like, about nature, they are a Cthonian focus on the cycles observed around us and how humans fit into that cycle. Rather than an Appolonian Christian idea that nature is lower than the spirit and inherently inferior because it "dies" and the spirit is "eternal". Simplification of the world around you into symbols provides a language that is easily reproduced, understood, and projected. Doesn't it make more sense that this is where this style of religious iconography may stem from? What we are talking about here are priorities, not knowledge. Folk art is more in line with practicalities and typically seen as a lesser form than that of academic or fine art. Art that I find interesting is idiosyncratic. And if you consider Folk art any art that comes from a non-academic context, then a lot of folk art comes from a very deep, personal, and idiosyncratic place. That, combined with an artists intuitive sense of beauty, is more interesting than a masterwork from the Renaissance that, beautiful and illusory as it may be, seduces us in a way that is still sensual; one's body still gets involved in a very Cthonian way. We want to touch it, gaze at it in admiration and declare how majestic it is.

After reading Shrines, Curiosities, and the Rhetoric of Display by Stephen Bann I was thinking about medieval triptychs and the Renaissance practice of the cabinet of curiosities in relation to a piece I did recently. The paintings I've been doing are very simple. They remind me of Paul Klee. I put a few of them along with Xerox photos I've taken in a wall mounted poster display unit like that you would find at a head shop or department store. What I find similar in medieval triptychs is that the wings are often hinged and double sided; they are meant to be opened and closed like a cabinet. Also, they almost always depict religious scenes from the bible, typically the crucifixion, which suggests the containment of a utopic vision. The poster display unit is interactive. With 15 double sided wings there is a possibility of 30 works on view to be flipped through. The usual use for the unit is to present posters that are for sale. The posters in the wings at department stores represent utopic vision as well. Each wing encapsulates a desire; whether it be the whimsical world of cartoons, a sports star, a psychedelic black-light poster, a musician/band, or a scantily clad female/male. People flip through the case and find what they want; something that is a signifier of themselves. It is a literal construct of the process of looking at art. It is as Bann so elegantly puts it, a "sacred prototype", "an endlessly transformed and transforming agent". There is a metaphysics of presence contained here. The display is a terminal where one passes through their desires. Like a window through which the eye must pass to reach its goal.

Triptych of the Family Moreel 1484 by Hans Memling

Bann sites Norman Bryson's use of this metaphor in his book Word and Image. Bryson describes this situation as resulting in "the supremacy of the discursive over the figural". Bann goes on to say that: "With the irresistable(sic) rise of the theory and practice of perspective from the Renaissance onwards, the Word will become predominant: color and form will be valued not in their own right, but only insofar as they enable and facilitate the telling of a sacred tale." Color and form are their own sacred tale. The question is, what's yours?
Paul Klee's epitaph: "Here lies the painter Paul Klee, somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual, but far from close enough."

mind your god

(Quantum)Physics in the past century has become more and more comparable to ancient religious or spiritual beliefs that typically revolve around a deep spiritual "knowledge" or experience. Studies in Particle physics seem to show that simply the act of thought and observation could be the only reason a particle of matter exists. This is like saying looking for something is the same as creating it. At the very least, it means it is impossible to observe reality without changing it. Issac Newton was a very religious man; but the church took a dim view of his motto: "Hypothosese non fingo" or "I make no hypotheses". He based his laws on sound experimental evidence that anyone would be able to reproduce. This is still the way scientific theories are accepted and validated(The idea that the atom was the building block of nature was proposed about four hundred years before Christ by Democritus, but until the late 1800s remained just an idea), but the findings of physicists keep getting stranger and leading to hypotheses that seem too psychedelic to be real. Newtonian physics are still applicable to the large scale world, but don't work on a sub-atomic level where common sense and intuition have no place. This disconnect is what led Einstein to denounce quantum theory and declare "God doesn't play dice", but Einstein also said "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen". Although Newton disproved Aristotle's view of matter's natural state being that of rest, He was very Aristotelian in his rejection of the(very eastern)idea of Hylozoism , the belief that all life is inseparable from matter; in other words, all matter has life. I do believe in Hylozoism. I believe plants think and that rocks live, and that thought alone is living matter, that prayer and meditation have a very real and physical effect in the world. In Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth Campbell says: "God is a thought, god is a name, god is an idea, but it's reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all catagories of thought." How can a thought think about itself? Perhaps Consciousness itself is our concept of God. And with the findings of quantum physicists one could conjecture that consciousness, at the most fundamental levels, is a quantum process. It is information like this that leads me to say we must accept science as mythology and mythology as science.

In this day and age we need a personal mythology just to survive. Our old mythological constructs and rituals have broken down to such a degree that out of human nature grows personal or what I'll call prescriptive mythologies. Some of the largest and most obvious people practicing this are artists. Indologist Heinrick Simmer told Joseph Campbell: "The best things can't be told...the second best are the misunderstood. Because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck with the thoughts. The third best are what we talk about." Visual artists of course know this. It's one of the reasons we do what we do. When someone asks what ones work is about one might say "if I could put it into words I'd be a writer." I might say "If I could put it into words I'd be a physicist". I consider scientists artists. In fact, there are far more interesting things going on in the scientific community than in art. This is one of the motivations behind my proposal that if someone wants one of my works they must start an art magazine, of which I will serve as editor and chief, in which all of the articles are written by scientists.

I like the story about President Eisenhower going to see one of the first computers. Upon walking into the room one of the scientists explains to the President that the computer has been programmed to answer any question he may have. Eisenhower asks the computer "is there a God?" and the computer responds "now there is".
And the scientist is the new Yogi.



Yogi 2006, oil pastel on paper © R. Sullivan

the poetry of motion

In physics, motion means a continuous change in the position of a body relative to a reference point. Newton's third law of motion, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, is common knowledge. If we can consider an accumulation of smaller actions one large action, such as the creation of a work of art, then it only makes scientific sense that the following work of art would be an opposite reaction to it. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but it feels that way to me. I mean this isn't an ADD thing. It seems to be a part of a natural order that when I finish a piece the next one must be contrary to it somehow. Why am I having trouble with this situation one may ask. Well, because people tend to distrust an artist who moves around a lot. It's taken as a sign of indecisiveness or immaturity. Like just about everything else in America(the whole concept of suburbia) this situation seems to be directly linked to war. It doesn't seem to be until after WWII that this idea of the artist brand comes into play. It has been conjectured that after the war American artists, in order to separate themselves from European artists, began to paint in a solid identifiable style revolving around common imagery or concept. Whether this was consciously done or not is beside the point; it happened, it was the sense of the times. Take two of the patriarchs of their eras as an example. Picasso painted two very different paintings(on display adjacent to one another at MOMA)in the summer of 1921: Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring.



Willem DeKooning spent the majority of his career making biomorphic paintings. Certainly everything he did after 1945 applies to this description.


Woman 1, 1952-3 / The Visit 1966-7 / Untitled XXIV, 1983

It's pretty obvious that there is more variation in Picasso's two works painted at the same time than in the three DeKooning's spanning thirty years. Of course this idea of the brand and American consumer identity was taken head on with the advent of Pop Art. If it was a national sense of solidarity due to America's enormous economic "success", having virtually a monopoly on manufactured goods and agricultural exports, after WWII that was part of this consistency in artists' practice what's in store for the America of today? The America that is virtually split in two because of war. The America in which the dollar consistently declines in comparison to the English Pound and the Euro. The America in which the average person spends 10% more than they earn with 70% living paycheck to paycheck. Keeping Newton's ideas from 1687 in mind might be a pretty progressive idea.



Newton, Painted C-Print on paper, tagged pinecone w/seeds, 2006 © R.Sullivan