...and recently,

I realized I have not shared anything for some time here. Like the song, "Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking..." and as we step each moment, "...into the future," what do we bring with us?

For a good period of time now I have been haunted by Robert Mapplethorpe. You know and I realize I have written much on this one man, and apparently I am not through with him, nor he with me, yet.
I revisited his opus, X Y Z, almost 25 years exactly from the first time I saw this on the opposite coast, in a show at LACMA on its final weekend. After, having to find a quiet corner where alone I could shield my face with sunglasses in an effort to hide the tears I could no more contain as they streamed down my cheeks, I wondered at the profound effect his work had on me. 
I still wonder on this. Unsure of the why of it, but happy and thankful in some odd way to have this experience. Searching for the meaning to my response and finding, what? 
1988. It was the beginning of my own life, a fledgling artist, and Robert was showing me his. 
2013. Midstream in my life, hopefully if averages apply, and I wonder at mine in comparison. Grateful to have the breadth of time and experience now as a mature artist so I can revisit this powerful series. Seeing my place in it and recognizing my own ideas and ideals...beauties magnificent and terrible to behold. Both equally wondrous. Like a storm containing all within itself.

In March I began work on a series, a series started a few years earlier in photographic images I created and filed away for the...future. A friend I met in 1988, and who as it happens satellites in and out of my orbit, reconnected with me asking if I would consider donating a painting to a charity he chaired. I was happy to be asked, and even more happy to be able to participate. So, the series I had on files would be executed, giving the first one to this charity. Silver 101, as it relates my image of Los Angeles in history and traffic. Silver being the screen, obviously Hollywood, land of endless illusion and where the past always meets the future presently... and the endless traffic, jammed together.

Silver 101 #1

Oil, Oil Stick on; Red Rabbit-Glue Gessoed, and Black Gessoed, Canvas

30" x 19"

2013

Michael Gardner

And then working in this silver, tearing up as the aluminum it contains burns my eyes, I realized that there was a previous file as yet un-executed too.
Robert Mapplethorpe's Auto-Portraits.
And so, Saint Robert I begin to execute. Analyzing his auto-portraits taken with polaroid, and painting them for him and also for me as I consider them self portraits as well. Producing the right shade of gold, noble and gesturing toward something from the past, became foundational to this work. 

Saint Robert #1

Oil, Oil Stick on Canvas

14" x 12"

2013

Michael Gardner

Both of these series, Saint Robert, and Silver 101 are in process, and will be seen in their entirety on my web-site when they are finished. Who knows when that will be? In the future.

Remembering The Gates

Thinking about a visit to my old home, New York City, from nearly ten years ago this winter to view The Gates, the monumental sculptural, site-specific work by Jeanne-Claude and Christo. It is an artistic reflection of beauty, endurance, community, and free form thinking and imagination...much like the city it was produced within. It is comprised namely of Central Park in NYC, in the winter of 2005, and the 7,503 structures that aligned pathways throughout this park. Connecting the space of the city park, and its inhabitants, with vibrant florid orange fabric drapes which were animated by the wind and yet seemed indifferent to any other elemental residue, as I was able to witness in the time I spent experiencing this monumental work all variety of weather; sun, overcast, daylight, night time, fog, rain, snow, and sleet. These ‘drapes,’ were singularly held aloft by steel and vinyl tubing structures in the shape of rectangular arches suited for pedestrian passage underneath. Lining the byways in the park like giant dominoes, yet incapable of falling one after the other, the drapery of the fabric billowed gently overhead and flowered the space enormously. Viewed up close they obscured the outstanding topographic scenery the park is known for, and from a distance exemplified the space with its gentle dotting of lines, illustrating the free flowing design each flaneur may stride as if on a 19th century derivee. But it isn’t the 19th century, and life in a modern and bustling 21st century city such as New York doesn’t provide the kind of time or psychic space one may have had when living in the times of one Charles Baudelaire. However, this public work, granted significantly with the aid of the city’s mayor Bloomberg, helped to recreate this mode of pedestrian ponder one was forced to reconcile while in the space, even if the work was disliked, as many voiced disdain for such a project.

Figure I The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)

The magical difference of the past in memory and said habit resulting from this past, versus the inescapable force of the now via The Gates, is a major shift and result of ones experience with this public work. Living in a major and crowded city, our senses work toward a focus of attention and protection together, as we make our way through life in this environment of choice. “We work out when and where to look, which sounds to tune into, what we can ignore. This ability to filter one’s perceptions, however, is stretched by the sensory excess of urban environments,” indicates Fran Tonkiss in the article, Spatial Stories. This understanding is reframed and underlined by Georg Simmel in his article, The Metropolis and Mental Life. “Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e. his mind is stimulated by the difference between impressions and those which have preceded.” Now take this, “Man,” place him in an urban context of the park, a place he may route routinely in his day or week, and has for years and years. Redesign the surroundings of this park, which through history of repetition through this space is augmented by the sculptural work The Gates, and this psychically challenges him to reconfigure in his mind the event of the space, forever changed now, and re-establish within his bodily memory map, a new experience. “...mapping is a form of abstraction explicitly linked to spatial geometry - ‘a conceptual grid that enables every phenomenon to be compared, differentiated, and measured by the same yardstick,” illuminates Phil Hubbard in his article The Represented City. This route in this city park will never again be the same. The habit in his mind of the space he travels through has evolved. His recognition of the park space once protected by the city essentially from the city itself, is redrawn in a manner which challenges himself in the space, and as Simmel continues, “...pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli.” The very rhythm of this man’s life, in a city that changes and doesn’t change simultaneously to one who lives in the midst of such a bustle for years, is altered. If even for the two official weeks The Gates was up, and then forever after. This is truly the power of re-presenting the city to itself through public art, and a piercing reflection of such a city through the enormity of its design and implementation. More specifically, calculating in the pain and upheaval from the circumstance of 9-11 just a few short years prior, one could view a prism like refraction of renewed possibility and beauty within the once darkened and shadowed change the terror of that day challenged the city, and how community was re-established through this as it crossed all boundaries of difference, such as race and economy, to refresh the integrity of such a place and the possibility in inclusion urban life in a city provides for all.

Figure II The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)

And just like that fateful day, the event of The Gates in totality and singularly of each individual, “gate,” marked through the artistry of sculpture, a passage of time. Walked under and through, each gate notates much like a clock; a tick, then tock, as each step touched upon the pavement, a moment in time. Recording the surroundings and experiences through the experiential demarkation The Gates imply and integrate into ones being, an aside if you will, to the permanent surroundings. Or evolutionary as nature in such a park would contain, but perhaps not to the eye as this kind of change happens so slowly one notices only in terms of memory to years past. Here is life for all of us right now, The Gates gently intone. Much as in the article, Writing the City, authored by Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley, when they wrote, “The city’s air, too, may be blent, composed of the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pain of those who live it; like Larkin’s church, it is a kind of vessel, filled with human experience.” I believe Jeanne-Claude and Christo understood this deeply. In their efforts to create a capillary system of pathways through a world famous park, they established a bloodline the en masse-human vessel contained, through The Gates. Enveloping the rich and poor alike under their guardianship.  As Preston and Simpson-Housley indicated in continuation in this article, “...the city is an active organism, which may prove to be a site of culture and inspiration, like Pushkin’s Odessa, but is more likely to be seen as oppressing its inhabitants and creating or exacerbating divisions within individuals.” The Gates understood this, and created a pathway through these oppressions. Uniting its inhabitants in play.

Figure III The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)

The journal article, Thinking Art Sociologically, by David Inglis, discussed many of the social and political encompasses art, in connection with a city, contain. Noting that there are, “...a great many issues connected with artistic matters...that we should not take the word ‘art’ at face value and accept it uncritically...the sociological view tends to see ‘art’ as always thoroughly bound up with politics [sic], the latter term is meant in its widest sense, where it refers to conflicts and struggles between different social groups.” Despite these assertions, The Gates succeeded in eliminating real or imaginary boundaries, and established a collective of interested parties from all social strata. Many of whom were not invested toward any considerations of ‘art,’ but in terms of allied constituents from the city to which they all belong. Participating in something unique and transient. Volunteers rising at dawn together helped deploy structures hard hatted engineers and constructions crews set out along paths. Uniting inhabitants side by side, city neighbor’s new and old together assembled each gate. Upon completion and ready for releasing the drapery making up the most visible and elemental feature of each gate, the New York Times article ‘The Gates’ Unfurling to High Hopes, by Randy Kennedy, February 12, 2005, quoted Mayor Bloomberg as announcing, “I can’t promise...particularly since this is New York, that every single person will love ‘The Gates,’ but I guarantee that they will all talk about it.” And photograph it, and explore it, and garner the attention of all the world’s cities. Quite an accomplishment a city notorious for so many reasons was accoladed, and an accomplishment for public works in every city worldwide. It may be site-specific and temporary, but ultimately temporal and historical for all time to follow. Temporaneous features prominently in a city, as people move in searching for dreams accomplishment, or desiring to anew a life dissolved of hope in a previous locale. The Gates is much like any new and also important traveller, who may or may not establish permanence in residence within any city’s estate. Like the ever changing face of architecture New York endows itself with, The Gates impermanence attests to this idea. Building’s may stay, or may be re-built, and much like the nature of New York specifically which re-new’s itself routinely as it’s space is small and unchanging (the borough of Manhattan, where all of this article features representation is obviously an island, and as such can only rebuild through new design; buildings, roadways, infrastructure. Tearing down and re-building back up again. It cannot spread out like pancake batter spilled onto the untouched outer limits as other cities can do), except through re-feature of aesthetic focus in architecture and the like. Phil Hubbard’s article The Represented City, again helps to understand these ideas. In citing Baudelaire whose prose understood this evolutionary attitude a city can possess when as he reflected on Paris:

Old Paris is no more (a town, alas

Changes more quickly than man’s heart may change);

Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;

The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;

The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;

The debris, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

...Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.

New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,

And suburbs old, are symbols all to me

Whose memories are as heavy as stone...

The “perceptual innuendo,’ as coined by Lyn Lofland is ultimately the basis and spine line for the monumental accomplishment The Gates gave us. The unexpectedness of such a visual intrusion upon such a famed space, as noted in movies, plays, music, and historical accounts of Central Park, is the focal point from which Lyn’s assertions would begin. This public work illustrates the whimsy of a magical and facile imagination, incorporating the history of the initial design for prominent gates, as was included in the first blueprints for the park, and from which initial inspirations for the project arose in the minds of Jeanne-Claude and Christo. The crowding and spectacle of the park’s natural and man made formations, flourished with the sculpture, and the spectacle of the people who inhabit the city as they make their way through the park; seeing and being seen. Part and parcel of the juxtaposition Lyn informs us of. As journaled in The 3Cities Project: New York Essays, by Richard Ings, “In Lofland’s analysis, the pleasures of the public realm are aesthetic as much as interactional. As well as the theatre of people watching and being watched, there is ‘the experience of enjoyment occasioned by certain (mostly visual) qualities of the built environment.” The Gates would prove to be a third party in this cultural, sociological, and artistic exercise, and as such I imagine will endure in the memory of the inhabitants who experienced it, the psychic essence of the park itself, and in stories and photographs shared.

Figure IIII The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)

Works Cited

Hubbard, Phil (2006). The Represented City. London; Routledge.

Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life. 

Tonkiss, Fran. Spatial Stories. Subjectivity in the City.

Preston and Simpson-Hously. Introduction. Writing the City.

Inglis, Donald. Thinking Art Sociologically. 

Ings, Richard. The 3Cities Project: New York Essays. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/3cities/ings.htm

Kennedy, Randy (2005) 'The Gates' Unfurling to High Hopes. The New York Times. Feb. 12, 2005.

The Self in the 21st Century...3rd section.

...Section 1&2 may be read on Facebook if you are a friend.

I wanted to move to Galisteo, New Mexico when I grew up and live the life of a recluse. Now it seems, this century makes a recluse of all of us as we no longer need to interface, literally, because we can intercyber instead. Alone with my gizmo’s I can relate when I want to. I hear when someone wants me but I don’t have to respond, the message will be waiting when I choose to view it. I can post a birthday greeting on YouTube for my best friend who will love it because it is so publicly declarative, and I didn’t have to leave my warm cup of coffee sitting on the dining room table to make and send it. I’ve connected and reclused myself simultaneously. 

This simultaneousness is the heart of living in this 21st Century, and its illusions are as solid as the little rectangular flat devices we carry in our pockets enabling us to access them. I don’t believe in accessibility, however it seems I rely on it around the clock and participate in its machinations just the same. As an artist I have made myself accessible in more ways than I care to intellectually or spiritually recognize, and as such have given way to faith over disbelief that the accessibility I invoke will be the same ones that enable a gallery to find and promote me and my ideas. Twittering like millions of other birds as we nest on invisible lines perched in our iPhones, we read and dismiss information that was carefully crafted in under 144 characters with speed freak like distraction. Distractions once reserved for the meth addicted or ritalin needing grade-schooler, now embody most of the people I know, myself included. Fed by a constant need to know what is happening in the world around us, I’m certain however I know less about the world than I did in the previous century even as news sources and their reports are IV fed into my devices. 

I no longer feel as if I inhabit a world, taking up my little space in it, but that I am inhabited and what space I did have is no longer filled by me, as I seem to exist less and less. 

I think this feeling starts with my work and awareness as an artist. As more and more people move into the realm of being 'artists,' regardless of creative ability, understanding, or thought, my art world and its space diminishes. I may be a part of the generation possessing its last artists, as actual art making has been dissolved and replaced by the idea of art. Even the idea is appropriated so no longer is an idea required to produce. The artist will no longer be necessary and the world will have digitized all of it. Printing an oil painting, xeroxing a sculpture, and gif’ing a moving image from several still ones; all amateur crafted through technology. Even Garageband makes music for you and Soundcloud publishes it, and that feeds into Twitter and gets shared on a blog that hundreds of followers reblog. A regular blogjam of regurgitated regurgitation. RT’ing has become the last bastion of individual thought. You no longer have to have a thought, just RT one. Worst of all the creation of Rap, as it proves to be the final sound of music made. There was a time when artists wrote songs, and a generation later that song was re-recorded by another artist. Royalties were paid, as was homage to the original source, and a new artists’ insight through their era’s eyes was shared. Now a rap artist writes and records a rap, but who is going to re-record Bitch N****z by Snoop Dog? No one. Once artists like Joni Mitchell could think of the royalties coming in from re-records, but Snoop can’t imagine this kind of financial dividend as his work begins and ends with his own efforts. And efforts that may have been lifted in a riff written by Miles Davis, or a loop digitized on GarageBand, anyway. 

This is what it means to be living in the 21st Century. The previous century’s beginnings was an open field of artistic and industrial innovations and progress. Diseases were eliminated or contained. Methodology was crafted and educationally implemented. Real estate was ergonomically planned and cities grew enriching their space as the inhabitants filled them.

The beginning’s of this century were birthed out of the Y2K scare, which proved to be unfound. Yet a few years later as planes flew into towers in Manhattan, we were forced to re-boot in a new era we may not have been psychologically ready for and the shock of that crash was much the same kind of shock re-booting implements. Anti-terrorism tactics of searching the elderly in airports before plane boarding, and reporting suspicious persons and activity vetted anyone in their biases toward those unlike, birthing internet bullying their ugly offspring.  Welcome, 2013.  

True Story:

Riding my bike home from my best friend’s house. Mom said be home by midnight. 

The field between our houses was a couple of acres. Old crops of wheat still sprouted up, but what was once farmland was now a field. This field would soon be new homes and a street connecting his neighborhood and mine would be in its place. I thought this field was pretty special. I didn’t want homes being built there. It felt sacred to me. Should be left alone. Sometimes I got scared riding my bike home through the field at night, down the dirt beaten path so many kids used. Used mostly during the day though. Sometimes I rode my bike all around the acreage even though the distance was triple, because I didn’t feel like crossing the field alone. This night I had to hurry to get home. It was getting late. 

Late summer night. Quiet. Beautiful and very still. Growing up in a town so silently silent, especially in the summer when everyone vacated to go to the lakes. I loved it. No one around. Listen for the train whistle from the tracks a few miles away just to be sure you aren't the only one left. Someone else is up. Someone else is awake. someone else is here.

Whistle blow. Blooow. Bloooow. 

A mourning dove in the evening as sun was setting would do the same thing to me. Remind me I’m not alone. Another being is near. 

Coo. Coo. Cooooooo. 

This night no train. Doves asleep. Just me. Soundless. The field. The dark night sky. The beaten dirt path. Somewhere a clock was ticking warning me to hurry. My bike metal chain and spokes banging as I rode shot home. Getting close to the street, closer to the homes and something catches my attention. A sound. A drone. A buzz. What is that sound? Like a garbage truck in hydraulic lift. Louder. More condensed. A sound I can’t place. What is that sound? I’m nearing the end of the field, almost to the street. Our house is across the street, second one from the corner. Always struck me as an odd location. Available. Exposed. Just off the edge, but not far enough in. Sitting silently in the dark of the night. A streetlamp on the opposite side lit the driveway. A small tree on the verge not moving. No wind. No one on the road. Just me, my bike, this sound. 

Squinting as I near the house, trying to orient the sound with my eyes in the dark. I’m starting to ride faster now this sound urging me. I see something. Noise coming from the end of our driveway. Something I can’t identify. Something is at the end of our driveway. The sound tells me it could be a garbage truck, but this is impossible. Not this late. Not on this day, not even close. I am looking at it trying to identify. It is smaller than a garbage truck, and my mind is trying to orient what I’m looking at. The sound confuses what the object could be. Not quite a truck, smaller. I am thinking a man with a shopping cart. A shopping cart? No, that is too small. Shopping cart doesn’t make that kind of noise. Doesn’t make sense. Mechanical electrical vibrating sound noise. So I think it must be, truck.  But no, what I see is too small for that. Smaller than a truck. As tall but not as long and more dense. 

I flash on the sound which is so loud now I wonder why no one is coming out of their front doors to investigate. This small college town where nothing ever happens. People leave their doors unlocked at night. Yet no one comes out of their front door. No one turns on a porch light. This sound. This shape of noise mass and a person behind it at the end of the driveway. Why isn’t the man in the garbage truck driving? It isn’t a garbage truck. He isn’t in it either. He is behind it. He is pushing it? I think of Mad Max. It isn’t necessarily a man. 

Something not from this time is at the end of our driveway and I have to pass it up our driveway to ride my bike into the garage. How do I know it isn’t from this time? From the space I live in? I am terrified, I am out of my body. What the hell is that. I want to cry. I’m scared. I can’t look at it any longer. That sound is near deafening. A male being with a shopping cart the size of a truck full of stuff making a horrible noise at the end of our driveway. I’m alone. I have to get home. 

I ride my bike up and over the curb diagonally across our lawn to the far side of the house where I know the gate to the fence is always open, otherwise I couldn’t get into the backyard. I ride around to the back door of the garage, connected to our house. Jump off my bike and throw myself at the backdoor to the house which is unbelievably locked. I can hear him. It. That. The sound is getting closer, right at our front door. I am banging on the back door with my fists, and miraculously mom appears. I am stammering. That sound. That sound. What is that? In the driveway. Mom! My mom doesn’t even respond. She looks out the window of the front door and nothing is there. No sound. Nothing. She doesn’t acknowledge my hysteria and says goodnight and walks upstairs to her room. I run downstairs to my room, which has windows on ground level facing the driveway.

Don’t turn on your bedroom light. You don’t want to be seen through the windows of your room.

I look out. Nothing is there. No sound. No man. No noise. No truck. Nothing is there.

Mapplethorpe. X, Y, Z @ LACMA and Getty

Condensed for an earlier blog post...I felt this was important to underline with the new shows of Mapplethorpe's coming to Los Angeles.

This past week (earlier in Spring of 2012) I was finishing up my finals for my second quarter back in school at Antioch University. In Academic Writing I was to turn in a research paper, on a topic of my choice. I thought it would be interesting to re-investigate the whole NEA/Mapplethorpe/Helms controversy, and decide for myself how I felt about government arts grants. I worked on this paper for a month. Twenty pages in length, it covered the topic in depth, and I was happy with the work I had accomplished.

On our final day in class we were to share a brief presentation on our paper, our topic. I volunteered to go first, and stated that I would read the first two paragraphs of my paper. It outlined in a personal format my experience with this show, and examined the NEA, and Helms' agenda.

To the class I read:

"On a thursday night, I went to the Whitney to see this obscene Mapplethorpe show, The Perfect Moment. Thursday evening's were free at the Whitney, and I was grateful for the sponsorship so I could view Robert's works. I was a young artist and I was about to have my mind blown by his vision."

Surprisingly, tears began streaming down my cheeks as I continued:

"I didn’t have much money in my pocket, and was grateful for this free evening of art, made available through the generosity of the museum and various sponsors. I was aware of Mapplethorpe’s flowers, his pictures of Patti Smith, and of celebrity portraits. I slowly made my way through the museum. Roberts works silently held their place, adorning the walls." 

I stopped reading. Tears ran down my cheeks. I had no idea what was happening to me. I offered my apologies to the class, expressing embarrassment and exasperation for the emotional response to my story sharing. I continued reading: 

"Glorious prints, with such deep intense blacks, it appeared you could slide your fingers into their depths, trailing ripples into black water at night. Soft luminous bodies, their physical perfection matched in how he captured them. And his flowers. Deep religious visions. Reverent, and also containing an occultish air, tinges of unspoken mystery floating within their folds. Satanic shadows played off their form, as they were expertly lit."

I stopped reading again. I was having difficulty as I tried to hold back my gentle sobs. What the hell was happening to me? I told the class that I was confused and stunned as to my tearful reading, and apologized. They kindly reassured me I was doing fine, and their encouragement allowed me to feel safe in our space to continue: 

"I wasn’t sure what part of the pictures to focus on, my eyes were drawn deeper and deeper into his work. These images, as they grew on me one after another lining the museum’s walls, brought me into his world. My artistic spirit was plateauing, and I wondered how high it could ascend. What I wasn’t prepared to see were all the partially nude black men. In business attire with enormous cocks hanging out of open zippers, or white mens genitals held fast in some kind of trap, barbed wire encasing it all. Finally, in all his glory, was an incredible photograph of Robert himself. Standing with his back to the camera, clothed in nothing more than a leather vest, and leather chaps covering his thighs, Robert looks over his shoulder and stares down the viewer. One leg rests upon a sheet covered riser, his legs spread wide as he crouches, revealing the handle of a bullwhip shoved into his ass. The tail of the whip hangs out and down, past his legs, slithering on the floor. It is incredibly disturbing to me, and I am nervous looking at this picture, with many others around me at the show looking also. Lastly I see Robert in close up, holding a cane adorned with a skull at its tip. You see his hand, the cane’s skull, and his head. All the rest is black. He stares into the camera lens, and beyond. This is the last self portrait Robert would produce. Looking into the eyes of this brilliant artist, I am moved outside my comfort zone. I am grateful to be here, at the Whitney in NYC, to see these works. To be exposed to these ideas. I wonder at the world, art, Robert, AIDS, the NEA, Jesse Helms, and where it all is going to go. The future and my life before me, what is left?"

     I finished reading. Tears streaked down my cheeks. I wiped my eyes, and looked down into my lap. Stunned, shell shocked. I felt like I just had an earthquake inside.The class applauded my efforts, and our professor spoke of the power of the written word. How even when we are writing, at times we are ourselves unaware how deep into our subconscious we are accessing, and what results will play into the stories we share. He commended me on my willingness to finish, and the beauty of my choosing to do so.

     I realized on a profound level the impossibility of Mapplethorpe's work being obscene. The response I discovered I contained inside my artistic soul after seeing his beautiful show, The Perfect Moment, had silted down into me. It became a part of my being, as have so many other great artist's works I've seen and resonated with, even if unaware. What I had understood about his work was now a part of me, even though I had not ever articulated it, until that moment. And I had to read it aloud to a class for the discovery.

     This is the power of art.

     This is the beauty of an artist leaving something behind.

The LA Times writer Jori Finkel on October 19, 2012, articled questions wondering if the re-newed shows at LACMA and Getty will strike again the chords of controversy.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-robert-mapplethorpe-lacma-20121020,0,4121613.story?track=rss&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=175674

The current air we are living in seems not so unlike the ones breathed nearly 25 years ago. I like to imagine we have moved on. I would hope all could see in his works what I saw, and how they touched me so deeply all those years ago. They raised my consciousness; my understanding of myself and the world I find myself living in, and those I share it with, and still do.

Tag

This summer I found many large printed photographs laying on top of the garbage container by the freight elevator on the floor of the building my studio is in. There is an agency-rep/management company of some sort also on this floor. They keep the door to their offices open all the time, something I find irritating as every time I pass their door coming or going from my studio I have that, "I need a hall-pass, why is the hallway monitor so mean," feeling I used to get back in junior high school. Like they are surveying the activity of the hall. Like they are in charge of this area outside their door, and have a need to know what everyone on the floor is up to. At any rate, they clearly dumped the photographs of one of their clients, or photographers, including the very expensive clear portfolio sheet liners they rest in for showing, out. But not carefully were they trashed, wrapped up inside a garbage bag. No, they were just casually disregarded on top of the garbage container for anyone who happened to pass, find. I thought they were great. Large semi-glossy prints from various photo shoots. Semi dressed young men selling towels, or jean jackets, or cologne. The kind of photographs created for a large fashion company print ad campaign. The one you would flip past in Vanity Fair magazine as you hunted for the index. Searching for an article by Christopher Hitchens that will be forgotten when you discover Rick Floyd no longer is the art director for Annie Leibovitz, and Tommy Hilfiger was busy at a charity event in the Hamptons, again.
What? Christopher is no longer with us? Rick Floyd has moved on? Hilfiger isn't charitable? Well, clearly it has been some time since I flipped through a Vanity Fair, or worked an editorial job with Annie Leibovitz and Rick Floyd.
Nervously fumbling through the thick pile, not wanting my "dumpster diving" to get caught, I thought about the photographer whose work was being tossed. I wondered if she or he was an ex-client of the "Hall-Pass Agency." I imagined how she or he would feel if they would come across the work I saw in my mind I was about to create, using their work as my base media of choice. I grabbed them all and walked the long route back to my studio, avoiding the Hall-Pass Agency.
Once back in my studio I spread them out all over the floor. I picked up my black oil stick, and without thinking wrote the first thing that popped into my head on the printed materials, Basquiating them fairly rapidly. I always wonder when I make new art who will see it, and what they will think. It is almost as if I imagine who the object is being created for, and this unknown entity whispers in my ear, "me."
Once completed I carefully hung them to dry, using paper tape and lining them up along a separate columned section of one of the walls. I would be able to look at them over the next two months as the oil stick slowly dried, and I would think about how I felt about them. Like I have mentioned here in the blog before, new works take some time getting used to, and the uncomfortable-ness with which I viewed this collection wasn't much different than any other new form I have rendered. Some of the images I loved more than others, as always happens in a series, but all in all they seem to sum up what I was feeling at the time. A kind of Rorschach, ink-blot response.
A picture is one thing, and asks the viewer to handle it in a specific manner. The written word is another thing and requires the same, but different, handling. Forced together, especially if the viewer were to read out loud the written words, would cause a third function of the art to be created. First being the work, second being the viewer, third being this combination of the two, taking each out of their self, and producing another entity entirely. This is the actual work, and something I am learning and dealing with as I continue my series The Word.

From the forthcoming series Tag, as yet not on my web-site:

Fags For Sale

Oil Stick on Photograph Paper

18" x 14.5"

2012

I Will Never Grow Old

Oil Stick on Photograph Paper

18" x 14.5"

2012

Thinking About Myself

Oil Stick on Photograph Paper

11" x 14"

2012

The Interview

Having a visitor to the studio exposes many things, all of which the artist has absolutely no control over. It is like when hanging a painting on a wall for viewing, the artist has nothing to do with what the viewer takes away even though their entire life has moved them to create the very thing which is now viewed in an effort to say something specific. What can you do? It is my job to be creative. It is my job to communicate something ineffable because the words needed to necessarily express this have not yet been created.
Words are created to pinpoint and express a certain reality. If these words don't exist yet then neither does the reality of it or the understanding...only the artist knows of it and like a shaman has to bridge the gap between these existing and non-existing worlds; conveying the illusive, magical thing into a kind of reality.

I am an artist. I am a shaman. I am that bridge, and not having the words I speak my information with pictures; these imperfect but elegant tools of communication.

Discussing and sharing work can be fun with the right person. I had the right person in the interest of Pauline Adamek, who came to my studio recently to interview me for ArtsBeatLA, her online journal and resource for all things arts-related in Los Angeles. She and her cameraman came to my studio located downtown Los Angeles in the Spring Arts Tower, to see for themselves who I am and what it is I do.
Preparing the studio for this, like any visit, is fraught with a kind of anxiety that goes beyond having a visitor into your personal space. As a working studio, it is filled with work. Work not specifically up for view as it most likely is in various stages of prep and duress, and so you refigure the space to show what you are working on, finished or otherwise, hoping it conveys where you are with ideas. Building an impromptu bridge for this visit and hoping you are understood in some context, and the variety of alchemical items strewn about as any artist will have as items of witness and inspiration, don't distract from the works that are dedicated for the visit. One never knows what a visitor will lock on, and I have had many visitors who find that one odd out of the way piece long forgotten or relegated to a quiet spot, and want to know all about it. Not bearing any relevance to where you are now, the need to find correlation and relationship to the works specifically out for survey takes over and can sidetrack the visit in many ways.

Ever as a teenager had your mom come into you room? This isn't necessarily unlike that. It can be a great visit and chat and lead to great things, or she may want to suddenly move your furniture around out of some unidentifiable boredome and odd desire to connect with you, impossible to understand until you have your own kids one day, and then  during this redesign who knows what may pop out from underneath your bed when least expected...
...but I digress.

I shared new works with Pauline. She beautifully created a dialogue that put me at ease and allowed me room to speak of my experience with these works without judgement, but a pure interest and an openness that any artist wishes for when sharing. We discussed the specific paintings I set up in a manner aimed to express the path I have been on in making them, with my alchemical items and witnesses around quietly holding the space and giving of their silent secrets. We talked for 35 minutes, and this was edited down to little over 7. All in all I feel it conveys a good sense of me, my work, how fast I talk, and cracks a light into the ideas that formulate the bridges I make I call paintings.

ArtsBeatLA Michael Gardner Interview