implicit art

This will be the first of a team-up I’m creating between This Too Will Pass and implicit art. On this site, I’ll post some interviews with artists about the work that permitted me to discover them. On TTWP, I’ll publish exterviews, that is, discussions about everything but. Kessler’s exterview is here.

This is my first such effort, with David Kessler, a Philadelphia artist who recently did an exhibition of his vlogging project, Shadow World. Shadow World documents what David finds when he takes his video camera out under the elevated light rail tracks in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Kensington is a huge, largely low-income neighborhood that resists change as much of the city attempts to re-imagine itself. At the exhibition, he supplemented the videos with 9 new paintings, all of which showed at the University of Pennsylvania’s International House from April 4th until May 30th.

For tech junkies, David and I conducted our interview using Google Docs. –BradyDale

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Brady Dale: The first question that I’ve always had about “Under the El” is why just Kensington? For folks who might be reading this from outside of Philadelphia, I’ll try to characterize Kensington, but, David, you should correct me if you think I get it wrong because I’ve only lived here a few years.

Kensington is a low-income area. I’d call it working class but it seems like a lot of people there aren’t working. I associate it more with poor white people than I do with other races, but it’s definitely mixed racially, and your videos capture that well. Kensington is also seeing an influx of development, led by young artists and cool kids moving in ahead of the other builders. If that’s not a fair take on the place, let me know, but, either way, why did you choose the place and why do you keep going back?

David Kessler: It’s a pretty fair representation but I would have to adjust it slightly. Kensington is huge. Shadow World really only scratches the surface of the different neighborhoods in Kensington and even then I only shoot under the El, which leaves a lot out. There are neighborhoods where there are very few white people at all. There are large Puerto Rican communities and some Vietnamese communities. and it’s true that
artists and cool kids are moving in in droves but when you look at the scale of Kensington and really how deep those people are willing to go into the heart of it, I would not say that they make up a very large percentage of the overall character of it.

The areas known as South Kensington and New Kensington are where most of the development seems to be happening and are seeing the fastest changes in ethnicity and culture. There are pockets of places where artists live. I’ve lived inside and outside of those pockets and, however you might feel aboutgentrification, I’ve always managed to find people around me both in the arts community and outside of it that have made me feel welcome in a place that for the most part can be characterized as unwelcoming.

I have to be honest and say that I chose to live there because I was able to find cheap places to live, but you are right about my choice to keep going back. I have periodically taken up residence in South Philly as well but I can’t say that i was ever very excited about South Philly with the exception of the food, an area that North Philly is still largely lacking in (to be polite). It’s really the grittiness, it is diversity and sense of history that makes Kensington more exciting to me. It can get pretty raw but I actually find it
beautiful, startlingly so at times.

But I should add, although all those things (amplified by the power and presence of the El tracks) inspired me to make Shadow World, I don’t feel that Shadow World should be viewed as being about or representing Kensington. That was never my intention. that would be a much different project. The truth is, I leave out as much information
about Kensington as possible and just focus on the individual people that I meet and places that interest me without getting into any of the history or specific sociology of it. I don’t even think of Shadow World as being a documentary, I would not argue that it is not but that is not how I think about it.

Brady Dale: You definitely keep your documentaries limited in terms of their context. It’s definitely about the people (and the occasional alley cat), and now you’ve done a series of paintings based on the videos.

Here’s the most interesting thing to me about the paintings (and I’ll just acknowledge that the following is an unfair prejudice, but here we go): I tend to assume that people who do video (or photography) can’t draw or paint. So, here I am at an exhibition that people have primarily shown up to for the video, and right next to those videos is a bunch of paintings that demonstrate a very high degree of technical skill. Very unusual to see the two things by the same artist side by side, in my experience.

They are very, very small paintings. So small that I did a bad job of photographing them because I’m not used to getting that close to a subject. Is this the scale you typically work in? And why did you decide to supplement the videos with paintings?

David Kessler: To give you some background, I’m a painter that started messing around with video a couple of years ago. My degree is in painting with a minor in film. I started painting “seriously” at around grade 5. When i say that I don’t really consider Shadow World to be documentaries, it’s because my thought process while I make them is more similar to that of when I paint to that of constructing a documentary, which in my mind means more about constructing a story than an impression of one.

Like a lot of painters, I think, I became somewhat apathetic to painting in the mid 90’s and my desire to so something “important” overshadowed my enjoyment of painting because it was fun. This I attribute to Art School and the notion that painting was dead that the Art Schools that I went to did not seem to argue with. I was never one to stick with one medium for very long anyway and when film, video and sculpture took hold I kind of let painting go for many years but I still considered it to be at the root of everything that I did.

The series of 9 paintings in the show now is the first series of paintings that I have made in many years. The small scale allows me to work in a way that feels more intimate and analytical to me, almost scientific, at my desk with sharp tools. they are done using a scratching technique that I have been using for a long time. Part of what makes Shadow World (the videos) interesting to me is the deconstruction of a moment, the ability to go back and focus on a short piece of time, analyze, interpret, arrange, manipulate, retell and distribute. These are things that interest me because they relate to how we digest our own memories and experiences. The paintings are intended to do a couple of things. One is to take that process to the next level by then analyze and interpreting the videos into a different medium, that much more separate from the original moment. To the viewer, my intention is to both clue them into my original thought processes of the videos as well as allow them to come to the paintings with a whole set of memory and experience based on the videos, altering the experience of looking at the paintings.

Brady Dale: If this is your first exhibit of paintings in years, then this show marks a somewhat important moment in your history as an artist. Where do you stand on painting now? Is it important? Is it “dead”? Does it need something else alongside it to justify it? Or have your priorities simply shifted?

David Kessler: I certainly don’t think of painting as dead anymore. These days, I don’t make too much distinction between mediums in my own work anymore. I just use what I think will be most successful. I was excited about showing some paintings again. I’m a pretty good painter and it would be a shame to not do something with a skill that i had been refining for so long. With that said, art still needs to satisfy me on several levels. I need it to speak to me on an intellectual level as well as an aesthetic one. Painting is so much about surface and I am naturally more critical of it than most other art forms so it does happen to be the art form that I am least frequently impressed by. I generally look in the windows of galleries showing painting and walk right by but that is also because painting to me seems like the art form that has become most formulaic. I think any artist can go to PAFA and learn all the tricks to be able to sell work. It’s not hard to impress most people with paintings once you understand technique but that doesn’t make a painting good to me. Interesting subject matter and compelling content in a painting is an incredibly elusive thing. But this is also why when I find a painter that I think is good, I am typically more impressed than I am with most other artists. I can’t say whether or not I will be showing more paintings any time soon. I don’t have any immediate plans to but I don’t rule out the idea.

Brady Dale: I think you are dead on about how easy it is to make a painting look impressive. In drawing, I know, all it takes to make a simple line drawing look “impressive” is to throw some cross-hatching in. Much trickier to get some substance in there. I think a lot of people look at artwork and find it impressive because it “must have been hard,” but what does that matter? I’m sure it’s hard to do taxes for Microsoft, but I don’t want to see the spreadsheets.

It seemed like something was missing in your answer about what you need in art to satisfy you. You said it needs to get you on an intellectual level as well as an aesthetic one. What about emotional? Are you going for an emotional hit in your work? Does it have an emotional hit for you? If so, where? A person could come away from one of your videos feeling anything from pathos to humor to tragedy to out-and-out odd/other-worldiness. Where do they get you?

David Kessler: Oh yeah, certainly emotional as well but as far as Shadow World is concerned the emotional element comes out when it is given to me. I can’t go out shooting with the intention of getting someone to say or do something that will elicit an emotional reaction. The most I can do is edit to put some emphasis on that moment. What i can do is go out with a very clear defined concept and pay as much attention to getting well composed compelling shots. I don’t believe in using emotional devices (like music or fades or slow-mo or any other number of tricks that filmmakers use) to tell the viewer how they should feel about a situation. the emotional element comes from being open to it but
there are times when it doesn’t happen and I have to feel like i have
enough substance there that the work is still strong without it. I think the work is far stronger if people can have different or mixed reactions and if they know that their reaction is their own and not fed to them. The videos may or may not elicit the same emotions as the original moments for me. in most cases, they can’t. I don’t have emotional reactions to my own work. I know when it is there but I am reacting to the moment not the video, which is something that no one else can truly do. I do feel that there is far more humor in the videos than most people seem to be (or admit to) seeing. My sense of humor tends to be pretty dark and dry and i don’t think that humor and tragedy are mutually exclusive but I would never tell someone that they should see something as being funny or tragic if they are only seeing one thing and not the other.

Also, back to the last topic, i look at drawing and painting differently. it may be because drawing tends to be a better record of the artists mind and hand in a given moment than painting but I can much more easily appreciate a drawing for the artist line work and the types of marks that they make despite the drawing’s content than that of a painting that seems to demand much more intent for me. This may have something to do with the factor of the moment of conception often being eliminated through the layers of paint. This might also explain why my paintings look more like drawings than most paintings do.

BradyDale: I have a feeling we agree on the parts that are funny and the parts that aren’t. I find Shadow World funny all the time, but more in that odd, sort of tilt your head and smile kind of funny rather than actually laughing.

My Young Philly Politics friend, Jennifer, says that you used to (or still do) go to Dunkin Donuts in the middle of the night and draw people. Is that true? What’s the story there? It’s an interesting concept in and of itself, but it also seems to echo Shadow World in that it’s another example of you getting out in the city and documenting your impressions.

David Kessler: That was a project that I was working on several years back and it was definitely the predecessor to Shadow World. I was living on Snyder in South Philly at the time. I wanted to make a serialized comic strip in The Philadelphia Independent, Matthew Schwartz’s now defunct newspaper. The strip would essentially be an illustrated documentary of the people who, for lack of a better word, “lived” in Dunkin Donuts on Broad and Snyder. There were a group of regulars, very few I think were actually homeless but you would be able to find most of them at Dunkin Donuts at any given hour, pretty much everyday. Besides the regulars, a bus to Atlantic City stopped directly in front of Dunkin Donuts (probably factoring greatly to its appeal) and there seemed to also be some kind of gambling operation being run out of there, too. For a good couple of years, it was just a fascinating place. I was also interested in the very severe separation between employee and “customer” and the exception to this in one man who seemed to have an honorary position there whom, as far as I could tell, was being paid in do-noughts.

I was using what was essentially a scratchbaord technique on ceramic tiles to draw the panels based on photographs that i was taking as I tried to meet and integrate myself into the population. Unfortunately, i didn’t get too far with the project. I saw how good it could have been, but I suppose I did not have the tolerance to spend that much time in Dunkin Donuts or the confidence to be able to really engage the people there. The strip ran once in issue #3 of the Independent and then I let it go. Over the year or so that followed, I saw Dunkin Donuts gradually get made over, progressively losing all of the seats to discourage people from loitering and I saw what would have become the logical ending of the story as the last of the tables where stripped away.

I guess you can say that Shadow World was partially born out of my regret for not continuing with the Dunkin Donuts project but it was years after Dunkin Donuts when i first picked up a video camera which for me made the idea that much more conceivable to accomplish.
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BradyDale is the editor of ThisTooWillPass. Now, read the exterview with David.

Every now and then I see art that sort of crushes me and elates me at the same time. For example, Brian Dettmer’s book sculptures. I love books. We might be at the tail end of the book as a form. I understand that, and, if books go extinct, it will probably be for the best. Some people probably regretted the demise of shadow puppet theater, too, but art moves on. Still, I’m torn, and it always kind of kills me to see someone destroying books.

But what he’s making is so beautiful. It’s so hypnotizing. It’s got both literal, visual and metaphorical depth. In an interview on What to Wear to an Orange Alert, Dettmer says he goes looking for heavy, old, reference books. He seals them up on the edges and then starts carving into them, looking for images and words that jump out at him. He doesn’t move anything, but he enables the viewer to see, all at once, words and images that they would have once had to go looking for.

I hate to see a nice book destroyed, but most of these books are “dead,” anyway. That is, as old sources or information, there are newer, more up-to-date, fresher books that people turn to for the same information now. The information in these books may not be useful, except for historical reference.

In a way, Dettmer gives these old books new life by tearing them to pieces. Interestingly, he doesn’t plan ahead. He seals it up and goes digging. It’s an improvisational approach. I’d be curious to see what he came up with if he picked a few images out ahead of time before he got the glue and carving knives out.

I first discovered his books at Centripetal Notion. Centripetal Notion seems to be a popular website with a strong community around it, but this post got 20 times more attention than any of his other recent posts. I think there are a lot of people out there who feel like I do. Books are great! They are still great! Try one! Try one!

Everyone wants you to win their interest at a glance anymore, but if you just glance at a book all you will see is a cover and a spine. So, writers are indebted to Dettmer, for his work in one way. A glance at a book after he’s done with it and you’ll see a little more — there is some exciting stuff in these things. Come see.
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BradyDale is the keeper of This Too Will Pass.

Technorati Tags: sculpture, art, books, excavation, carving, Brian Dettmer, Atlanta, Chicago, BradyDale

Every artist should have a website, or at least a blog. This is a point I’ve been making to a friend of mine who’s trying to make her creative way in New York City. She’s doing this and that, meeting with little successes here and there, but it isn’t quite adding up to something whole yet. If she had a website, I argue, it could help people see her body of work. Plus, it would help her be accountable to herself and other artists. The web helps artists keep going in more ways than mere self-promotion.

That said, a tension will develop between your site and your work, especially if you blog. Copyblogger says that he developed the blog not to become a pro-blogger, but because he saw it as a way to become better known in the circles where he does his real work. I think that’s right. If you’re a good sculptor, you should start a blog so that people are interested in sculpture will find out more about your work, your thoughts and your creative process. The hope being that some of those folks are interested enough to buy and they will.

The trouble is, you still have to keep up the blog.

As I’ve been working on my Earth Day Card, I’ve been spending much less time in front of the computer. This has become a sort of guilt inside me, that I’m not generating some semi-interesting new essay every day for folks to read or find or think about. I’ve started to feel a responsibility to the netizens. Once upon a time, I would go to bed proud and content if I’d gone to the gym and spent two hours at the drawing board after a workday. Now, I feel like something is undone if I don’t write something here. Like I didn’t brush my teeth. Or I didn’t make my bed.

Okay, I never make my bed.

So I thought about this tension, and came up with some mental strategies the artist-who-blogs can use to make sure the blog serves you and you aren’t serving the blog:

• Blog about your artwork. This is the most important rule I’ve got for you. If your best work is your sculpture/writing/video/comix, then that’s what you will write the most interesting posts about. Plus, if you’re writing about your real work then you are thinking about your real work and you’ll get back to it.
• Blog first - but keep it short. You don’t really have to blog every day, but if you’re going to carve out some time to blog, then you should carve it out before starting your real creative work. Let blogging clear out the cobwebs in your head before you start working, but if you don’t finish the post in the time allocated, hit save as draft. Your public can wait a day.
• Your process is interesting, so blog about it. Don’t interpret your work at the end. That’s not a story. The story is how that crazy stuff you do comes together! We all think our creative process is boring. We don’t see why anyone would want to hear about the fact that we take an old racquetball into the backyard and bounce it against a wall in time to the lyrics we’re composing. It is interesting, though. An artist’s bizarre little creative quirks are, perhaps, the most interesting thing he or she has to write about. So write about it.
• Blog about your progress. I need to do this more. Try to read and be read by some other similar artists, so you know that other folks that will understand are reading about it when you write about how far you’re getting. Maybe it’s just me, but I find accountability motivational. I want people to know if I’m trucking along or if I’m on dead center, and knowing that someone is seeing those reports makes it more motivational.

If you’re an artist-who-blogs, it would be great to hear you say whether or not you feel this tension, like I do. Is blogging giving you a more short-term view of creativity? Is there a tension between long projects and punchy posts? How much time does blogging take up for you? Do you have balancing strategies of your own? Do you think mine are wrong-headed?

I’m still working on convincing my friend to start her own blog. Once we’ve got her on-line and she’s feeling comfortable with the Internet, I’ll make sure you all know where to find her. Till then, I took today off so I could finish the inks on page one of my Earth Day Card and get page two drawn. So I’d better get off here and back to work! What are you getting done today?
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BradyDale keeps up ThisTooWillPass.com

Today I did something embarrassing. It was the kind of thing that only an Internet neophyte does. See, I’ve been really focusing in on my blog lately and reading sites that talk a lot about good blog promotion and use of social networking and blah blah blah.

So I finally decided that I should join StumbleUpon and Digg. I’ve been a member of del.icio.us for a while (which can’t be beat for lo-fi simplicity and keeping track of sites you want to spend more time with later - that is, not at work) and Utterz. Of course, there’s a ton of other sites like these out there, too. The basic idea behind all of them is that users will identify things that they like and other users will find them. Then, as people organize themselves about shared interests or tastes, they’ll get better and better at sharing sites they like.

Fine, but I resisted because I burn enough time on-line as it is.

Well, part of the process for joining StumbleUpon.com is checking your address book to see if you have many friends who are on already. It turned out that I only had about 10 friends who were using the site and over 200 contacts that were not. I wanted to add the folks who were on there, but I didn’t really want to add the ones who weren’t.

Wouldn’t you know, like an Internet Neophyte, I hit the wrong button and sent the invite to everyone. Friends who don’t like me anymore, ex’es, co-workers, estranged former bosses and girls I couldn’t get a date with. People who don’t even remember me! Everyone!

I guess it doesn’t hurt much, but it did strike me. Of all the tech savvy people I know, only ten of them were on uber-hip StumbleUpon? How odd? Yet all these sites have thousands of users! Yet only about 5% of my contacts were on there!

I know that this will change over time, but I realized this morning that, for now, as much reach as the big social networking sites have, they all pretty much have the same reach. My guess is that if you did an analysis of the people on those sites, you’d find that they are, by and large, pretty much the same people. Like me, they’ve all just joined as many as they can handle.

Meanwhile, though, I think creative techy types, like the readers of this site, have an opportunity… NAY, A RESPONSIBILITY… to find ways to use these sites not to just promote our creative work but to hijack them and turn them into creative works. Like, by creating mazes of links that pass through multiple ones or games for our readers to play where they solve riddles through our pages or… I don’t know… on-line installations of Tagged, Stumbled and del.icio’ed sites. You decide… but I smell new space here.

Digg it!
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BradyDale

One of the most fascinating discussions that emerged from the iCommons iSummit, at least for me, came out of the presentation by Israeli rock stars RHYTHM BEATING SILENCE aka RBS. Their fascinating story is of a band who "made it," but in a small scene driven by virtually one label and one radio station, were completely taken advantage of. Instead of sitting idly, the band went on their own, and gave their music away for free (now all under Creative Commons licences), making money by playing gigs and archiving their albums. Everything is available for re-mix use and non-commercial distribution through their web site.  We went on to discuss revenue generation for lesser known artists, various production modes, DIY art and the importance of collaboration. RBS’s frontman, Nimrod Lev, is quite an interesting activist - here’s a translation of a recent speech he gave at the University of Haifa. Money quote (speaking of criminalizing the downloading of music):

Personally, I was never willing to think of my audience as criminals or to turn the people for whom I create music into criminals, just because the music industry is in a crisis. …
 
I would like to begin with the opening lines of the announcement we attached to the song "Vegas" which was played here earlier:

It does not matter when and how the music and all that is related to it became only a matter of business and commerce. It happened. The love of music became marginal, and in most cases it is not part of the considerations of music products, marketed to the public.

You probably know what greenbaiting is, right? Like when they put hybrid engines in an SUV?  Or when they put 20% post-consumer content in paper plates and call them "eco-plates?" Tonight, I think I experienced the same thing in technology and entertainment. I went and saw Superman Returns at the Tuttleman IMAX in Philadelphia.

The movie was great, but I wasn’t so hot on the IMAX. This wasn’t my first IMAX experience, but it was the first time I’d seen a traditional movie on one, as opposed to some nature film or whatever.

I’m not really sure the movie was shot on IMAX tape. It definitely, definitely warped at the edges throughout the movie. This distracted me the whole time.

The lower corners noticeably did not fit on the screen. They had it too wide. No one would have objected if they would have pulled it in a few degrees. it still would have been huge.

I also found that during some of the really chaotic scenes where a lot is happening yet the director shoots in close so you can hardly tell what, you really couldn’t tell what with the IMAX. In fact, the screen almost seemed to black out during the really chaotic close stuff. Again, distracting. I will also be interested to see it in a regular theater and see if anyone ever looks blurred. Many parts of the scene often appeared blurred at times. Again, possibly another effect of projecting at a level the original film had not been meant for.

The biggest problem, though, was that there really was hardly a good seat in the house. The seats were far too close to the enormous screen. I was turning my head through the whole thing and I could never see take in the whole screen at once. And my seat was roughly in middle. I feel very badly for anyone further down.

At the start of the movie, they run a little text across the screen and everyone laughed because no one could really read it. It was too big and we were all too close.

In the end, I wish I would have seen it at a normal theater. I feel like I was suckered in to see it on the super-high-tech screen.

Overall, though, it was a great film. Then again, I know I’m a sucker for big heroes and heroics. I like being a sucker for that, though.

I know that most of the folks who read this aren’t American… but if any of you follow American literature for what ever reason and find it wanting… it’s worth knowing that there is a group that is resisting the mainstream not just by producing its own work, but by doing the occassional protest and bellicose hollering at the tyrants of American lit.

We’re a bit grumpy.

Anyway, I’m one of the 30-something members around the states… recently inducted. Go me. We are working on kicking up a few particular storms in coming days, but I thought I’d promote a little something I’ve started doing on the site in South Africa before I really start talking about it in the states too much. I’m going to start running a weekly homily, or public prayer, on the site. These homilies will be humorous commentaries, but they are genuine prayers as well. They are audio files recorded with an old Compaq Ipaq.

Here’s the first.
And the second.

The third will be out next Wednesday. I promise it will make you laugh… though it will also be rather crass. The fourth is already recorded… in it, I’ll actually touch on literature for the first time.

I also highly recommend checking out the ULA’s Monday Report Box and other fine ULA writing.

The ULA’s leader and founder, King Wenclas, has the fine distinction of running the most threatening and hated blog in literature. Check it out! Get scared!

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Brady Russell
Underground Literary Alliance
Rank-and-file

it seems that heads are heading to cape town this weekend for the sessions ekapa.
will be coming out from my hide out to join the masses this summer and will try to get some pics whilst there.
i don’t know about the Jozi dudes but cape town seems to be getting a lot of slices of the art world of mzantsi.
is cape town the new big thing and are cape town artist now the big deal? Are cape town artists and galleries in?all eyes on ekapa!!