Runs With Brushes: 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: