Compassion:

sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.

Empathy:

2: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

Awareness:

2: having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge

Respect:

2: an act of giving particular attention : consideration

In thinking about Anthony’s show, I can’t help but draw some connections with a book I’ve been reading (parts of) lately called “The Art Instinct” by Denis Dutton.  He writes about art from an evolutionary standpoint: “Even before the Pleistocene, many animals, as well as our proto-human ancestors, would have assessed potential mates with an eye toward their abilities to acquit themselves adequately, or better than adequately, in fitness tests.  The sexual selectionist view is that performance in fitness tests may have begun in courtship contexts, but it eventually came to spread out and saturate the whole of human social life.  Fitness displays for modern humans are not, in a word, just about mating: they have been extended into our regard for human achievement more broadly conceived.”  (p.190)  The first experience that many viewers have of Anthony’s work have, I think, must be awe at his skill with those tiny pieces of tape.  It is a display of fitness that we cannot help but admire, and perhaps on a most basic level, this work is made for a “potential mate.”

I say this with a bit of humor, because I know that there is a lot more going on in the work and in Anthony’s thinking about the work than just a display of talent for the purpose of attracting a mate.  My favorite work in the show was the sky piece.  I liked it from the moment I saw it in the studio, but it gained a great deal for me when I saw it in the show and saw the way that the structure began to disintegrate and fly off into the sky along the diagonal edge.  This denial of perfection makes it all the more interesting, revealing the artist’s hand, making it clearly a work done by hand and not, as it might appear from a distance, by a machine.

The relationship between images of nature and the overlaid drawings places the work in a sort of psuedo scientific realm, which may also be why I thought of the Denis Dutton book.  Do these drawings reveal something about an invisible structure inherent in the natural world (flower, waves, fire, clouds)?  Or is it that they overlay a structure imposed by humans?

One question I have for Anthony is about the grid lines, because I noticed that you only drew the grid on the part of the flower image where you planned to put the tape, whereas we see it on the whole sky image.  I think I prefer not seeing the grid lines beyond the tape, but what do you think Anthony, and what do others think?

In order to form some thoughts about this work, I realized that I first had to try to forget everything that Anthony had previously said about the regulations of the space, not obstructing the fire lane, etc….  Mainly because, for an outside observer, none of that has anything to do with my experience of the piece.  So, the experience….

I walk into the gallery.  Or, do I walk through a space that is really a hallway, posing as a gallery?  And there is the back of a wall, a stage set really, because it is dark behind this wall, and the lights are facing it on the otherside.  So I become the actor, about to go on stage.  Once I go infront of this wall, however, I do not face an audience, only another wall.  I start thinking about the way that a work of art, hung on a wall, is supposed to “perform” for an audience, when really it might spend the majority of it’s life addressing the opposite wall.  The wall is also broken.  If I continue to think of it as a stage set, it means that I, the performer, am framed by the context of a broken set, ie. a broken world.  And in between the walls, I am stuck, unsure as to what wall I’m supposed to address.  If I am still the actor, I should have my back to the broken wall, but if I am an observer, I should look AT the broken wall; since the lights illuminate it, it should be the focus of my attention.

What threw me, and still throws me, is the cinderblock and beer.  Frankly, I think that the piece might be more successful without it.  I understand that it is saying something about the event of an opening, with the partially filled beer glass on the cinderblocks, but the two walls form, for me, a complete work, and so this sculptural piece didn’t hold my attention or my interest the way the rest of the installation did.

Nathan:

The idea of intermission, given to us by the title and the center piece of the “2001” Intermission, set on loop, is what I approached the show thinking about.  Ultimately, though, the show really seemed to be about the ways that changes in media and technology effect our experiences of past works.  Because of technological developments, the intermission that had to be built into a long movie like “2001,” and which would have been deliberately timed, can take place anytime by hitting pause on a DVD player.  The movie viewing experience has also changed from a communal one (I imagine everyone getting up at intermission to get a drink, use the bathroom, etc…) to a private, customizable experience.  In the case of records, there was a built in pause when one reached the end of one side and had to flip the record.  The CD can have none or many “intermissions.”  Although I understood the stack of photocopies of Rucha’s book to be about the photocopy overtaking the book (one technology overtaking another, while not necessarily rendering the other obsolete), I had a hard time connecting that piece to the idea of intermission.  It also had less to do with notions of temporality—pause, repeat, etc…—than the other two pieces.

The other thing I started thinking about, especially with regard to Nathan’s performance at the opening, was the idea of allure.  Allure might not be the best word, but it’s what I’ve got for now.  Does part of the allure of The Beatles lie in having and listening to an LP version of their music, rather than a CD?  Is part of the allure of “2001” to be found in having the big screen experience?  Is part of the allure of an Ed Rucha book actually holding an original copy?  And does the allure of a presentation by Nathan lie in experiencing it just once?  In all cases, what Nathan presents is the un-alluring version.  Since I had seen his presentation before, I found the Thursday performance less engaging than the first time I experienced it.  Even in the presentation itself, we are allured by the words and images, only to have them both diminished in importance once we realize that the images are on a repeating loop and have not been timed to coincide, in a pre-meditated way, with what Nathan is saying.  So in the performance, and in the three pieces in the show, I had a kind of confrontation with what allures me in each instance, because Nathan took that away.  Is it, than, this sense of disappointment that we are meant to feel?

Allen:

Since it’s been a few days since I saw Allen’s show, I’m paying attention to what pieces I can most easily recall, since those are the ones that left a most lasting impression.  The first one that comes to mind is the black square painting with the strings going down to the floor.  Then I think about the self-portrait figure, and then the piece at the far back of the room—the square that casts a shadow, that casts a shadow.  With the two pieces, there is something about the vision being directed down to the floor, just slightly ahead, that I find compelling.  Why is that point, one pace ahead, on the ground, so interesting?  It is so different than if the gaze (of the figure or from the black painting) were straight ahead.  It makes sense that the gaze is down, because that is where shadows fall—on the ground, just a pace ahead (or behind).  

Clearly shadows are an interest of Allen’s.  The shadows cast by the half-a-chair, by the whole chair (rendered with broken light bulbs), even the actual shadow of the figure cast ONTO it’s own rendered shadow, all of them seem to create a materiality out of what is normally immaterial.  This is the aspect of Allen’s work that I find to be the most intriguing—his investigations into many possible ways to make this immaterial thing—a shadow—embodied and material, physical, manifest.  I thought that all the pieces in the show were really well crafted, carefully attended to, and well considered, but the pieces that I felt were most successful were the shadow pieces.  

howdy gang