Indexicality

Joel Snyder:
When people talk about indexicality, they generally confuse photons with objects, and they think it is objects that are necessarily indexed by photographs. It may very well be the objects that are indexed, but nothing in the way of an object need be indexed by a photograph.

Trash patch

This is quite an amazing story. At first I kind of thought it might be a positive story about how ocean life is adapting effectively to this new, human-derived environment. But then I read about the fish with plastic in their stomachs and I thought, not so much. But how amazing is this? You can't tell how large it is from this picture, but if this quantity of small stuff is what's in there, how the hell could you clean it up? Size of Texas, they think this patch is.

Look how the fish are treating this area, like it's a coral reef that they interact with. The evolution of these artificial forms that find themselves with utterly alien afterlives fascinates me. It's like when you're little and you think your toys have a life of their own when you're not there; maybe there's something to that. Material things don't enact their own fates, but they're a part of the evolution of the physical environment, as shaped by all of our actions. This patch is like a garden gone wild (...and with toxicity in the groundwater).

There's four left in the box/Eureka moments

Direct quote from source:

"A single grain of sand is not a heap; that’s obvious. A heap is a collection of things, you need several things to make it up. Two grains of sand isn’t a heap either; a heap is a collection of several things, more than just a couple.

The concept of a heap is fuzzy, though; there’s no precise number that marks the difference between heaps and non-heaps. It’s not as though 37 grains of sand aren’t a heap but 38 are. Defining precisely how many things one needs in order to have a heap is impossible.

This is what gives rise to the paradox of the heap (also called the “Sorites paradox”, sorites being the Greek word for heap).

Suppose that we have a collection of a million grains of sand. That is absolutely, definitely, undeniably a heap.

Because there is no precise number that separates heaps from non-heaps, removing a single grain of sand from a heap will never turn it into a non-heap. If you have a heap of sand, and you take away a single grain, then you still have a heap.

If you have a heap of a million grains of sand, though, and repeatedly take away a single grain of sand, doing so 999,999 times, then what do we have at the end of the process? Is it a heap or not?

Taking away a single grain of sand cannot turn a heap into a non-heap. We had a heap of sand at that beginning of the process. All we did was take away single grains of sand. Therefore what we have at the end of this process can only be a heap.

What we have at end of the process, though, is a single grain of sand, and, as we said at the beginning, a single grain of sand is obviously not a heap. The single grain, then, both is and is not a heap."

Do you ever feel it's all been done before?

This Tom Friedman thingy is made out of 30,000 toothpicks. I was prompted by AG's comment that she likes things that look like they were fun to make. I agree, I do too. I covet the having made them myself-ness. I like things that look like they lead out of something that was efficient or made sense according to some unspoken natural law (the tapered shape of the end of the toothpick). I like to think of his play with a thing and discovery of what the natural properties of that thing are and where it should go, and then he takes it all the way there.

Cereal boxes can also have natural properties.


This is, like, the seminal Friedman work (IMHO, obvs). This is just made out of several identical cereal boxes. It's the thing in itself only more of it and bigger, and because of that vaguer. Like, the accumulation and aggregation of many equals more volume but less specificity. The trade-off for scale is lack of resolution; this is like a 3d jpeg. Blur = dilution of exactness caused by excessive multiplication. Too much same = no longer separately clear.

You can get all this from a thing that simply looks (ie is visual. As in, looks like only without the simile). There's power in something that can be seen and not said, but you can't explain that power by saying, because it's in the seeing not the saying. Things that can only be known by seeing are everywhere, in graphics, in photography, images of all kinds. In the dialectics of streets and buildings and trees and the light from the sky. But how can you explain any of that without the thing that is seen that is the explanation in and of itself? (Eh?) It's like the difference between doing and planning.

Yesterday I joined a small group of friends trying to help a collaborative pair of artist friends to workshop a long-running project they've got going on. Because of the kind of project it is (connected to a festival) with lots of planning time, they are researching and researching and trying to draw the work out of that. But they're blocked, stymied by what is a non-intuitive process for them. Can't make the leap from research to performance/work. From what it's meant to be about, to thing-that's-independent-of-all-else-but-itself-and-embodies-ideas-rather-than-illustrates-them. Which is what they normally do intuitively. We have so much to prove/explain all the time, it reduces our confidence just to do. It sounds so airy-fairy, intuition, but the thing is our intelligence as artists needs to be trusted (inc. by us) that we will be able to embody intelligentness (intelligence?) in the thing itself, in how the thing itself is executed, rather than in via how known a quantity it is before it is undertaken.

I'm struggling with this meself.

I seem also to be making a collection of works that are pieces of A4 paper.

I owe someone a nail. It's waiting patiently in my studio. It's actually nail plus these days. It's accrued interest. But not in anyway that undoes the inherent simplicity of nail as nail, fear not. It's just more practical now. Shall I show you? OK, hang on. Maybe next post.

More on Martin Creed sort of

I quite like this one. There's a kind of art where you get painted into a corner by the history and possibilities of art, and it's so inhibiting that all you can do is something very simple or small.

Are we running out of possibilities, though? Surely not. Perhaps if you have fixed ways of thinking about things, then that might happen. A radical shift isn't so easy. maybe MC's work is not any kind of shift, but it's a kind of narrowing of the field.

I feel a bit like that sometimes.

Sometimes also I think I like works based on what I imagine making that work to have been like. I would like to have made this. I would have enjoyed it, I would also like to be confident enough with my practice to make such a work and classify it thusly (a work).

Maybe it's just about getting rid of all the limitations. But thinking is a discipline, you develop your own way of doing it, and without that limitation, I don't know if art is possible. Without limitations. Therein lies the paradox.

That's something to work towards: the courage to strip things back further, further and further.

OK, it's definitely leave the house time.

Melange du chose au deux jours

Yesterday I tried to find fabric town, but got lost in 'normal people live here' town. It was lovely, actually. Lots of tiny narrow streets. I found a shopping street that I decided was functional and not uber consumerist and paradoxically went a bit buying things crazy. The ceramics they have here are to die for ... I still want to go back and buy the $50 red mug ... today I managed to only spend money on lunch and entry to a parky thing. What a star! Such restraint!

I've seen no art yet, I keep wandering on foot and getting lost in neighbourhoods or shops, or getting lost on a bike. Tomorrow I am totally going to see some art.

Today there were iris fields, which were frankly a little bit overrated (or perhaps it made me nostalgic for my Mum's garden). It was full of Japanese couples of a certain age, which is nice, and many were doing watercolours of the flowers. Yesterday I bought these dried banana things and they are so amazing that I've now looked up whether I'm allowed to bring them back to Aust (I think so, if I declare them) ... soooo goooooood.

What else happened in Tokyo? My charming host took me to a beautiful bookstore, full of gorgeous books on the twentieth century avant gardes. I can't tell you how pleasing a second-hand bookstore can be made to the eye in this country. I just can't. I exhibited great restraint in not buying the book of photographs of Morandi's studio in Bologna, or the Fluxus artist's book wherein all the contents of a table are described in great detail.

Oh, curry is ready! I'm being so well-looked after.

Meh

I am losing my fabulous studio.

It was enormous, fabulous, free, and mine.

But I knew it wouldn't last forever.

Here it is, in happier times (detail):

I also haven't found a new house yet. I hope this will happen soon. I will have to do some major purging.

I'm trying to write an artist's statement that somehow says everything. It's hard.

I think I will post more often. Will that please you?