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| The Artist Studio, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts / Installation 2014 / Radocaj |
Whereupon it began to rain very, very
softly.
I was walking upside down on my palms, feet in
the air when I met the lion. Its habitat looked a bit like a dog house but also
a bit like a row house, and the enclosure had a small area of green-ie things
and a small area of concrete-ie things
but obviously not enough of either because it was a very big lion. I resolve
that zoos are in fact miserable places but probably necessary for the animals
born into these types of scenarios. I remind myself that I do want to watch
that ‘Blackfish’ movie about the orcas even though I know that it will upset
me. The lion and I face each other directly and over the scalloped, deteriorating
wrought iron fence and take in each others’ size. I half fall half reach over
to it and grasp around its gigantic skull. Its head is so big that its nose tip
reaches below my navel and its fore head extends another several inches above
my head. I push with all my bodily weight against it and it nuzzles and rears
its head like a horse I used to train with. It doesn’t feel like a
shorthaired-dander-ie cat as I thought that it would, but instead like something
of glued feathers and cardboard. Before I can pull back again to better look at
what must be a giant puppet the youngest dog coos her familiar whimper. 5:20AM
–ish as she usually does.
New Year’s
morning is always a strange feeling day but it’s never really all that
different from any other in the calendar.
The faintest purply-bluish-whitish light is behind the curtains like it
always is. The night before after my families yearly downtown party Wojo stated
his intent for us to stay up all night drinking and toasting the new year
privately but we didn’t last much long after 2:10AM, as I figured we would. Wojo
is still asleep and I begin the daily rituals: bathroom, dogs, tea kettle,
vitamins, water, beer bottle clean up, dishwasher, stretch, dog retrieval,
biscuits, coffee assembling, Wojo hydration kit (one hot tea, one can diet
soda, one glass half juice half water, one tablet Alpha Brain, one tablet B6
placed bedside for when he wakes up), computer power up, email, calendar, news,
social media, cigarette. They are all back asleep in bed my morning tasks done;
initiated me time.
Saw on
social media that one of my sisters’ high school class mates was one of the
judges for a large national women’s reproductive rights organization short
essay contest about the personal choice of abortion; fiction or non-fiction,
original work, 200 words or less, call for entries was due in by the 3rd.
Wrote one up in about thirty four minutes, re-read-edited-and-proofed dozens of
times, thought briefly and self critically about why that seemed too easy to
do, passed it over to a really interesting writer that I met this summer in Las
Vegas who lives in Syracuse (she might sleep less than I do; for input she said
: ‘was pretty good for a first go at a short
story, send it out’), and had in the mail some while before 8AM even though
it was forty-five words over.
Our world
inside the brick and horsehair plaster steadily begins to awaken, and all the
living entities in the home go about their day doing as they do their customs.
I spend it cleaning, listening to music, reading articles, communicating with
my family and friends the obligatory New Years correspondence, dipping in and
out of the odd recreation video game and playing with the hounds. All the while
-I can feel it- in the back of my
head trying to figure out the about what am I going to make this year. Art.
Whereupon I descend into the cavern.
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| Meditation Rage Chamber / Installation 2014 / Radocaj |
I have an
exceedingly makeshift studio in the basement of our house. Wojo prefers to call
it the “Meditation Rage Chamber” because he keeps his heavy weights down there
and likes to work out while watching action or sci-fi movies on mute while
German industrial music plays. It also has a place where we laid all the carpet
remnants over the bare concrete floor to stretch out, yoga ball, or meditate.
And we have a little stack of wooden orange crates where you can burn incense
or leave your drink in a safe place. The back wall is packed with belongings of
my family; many of the things are interesting to look at but I really do not care for how they
treat my house like it’s a storage locker. Most of the things they haven’t
touched or looked at (or I guarantee thought about) since I moved in. Opposite
wall has all art equipment, tools, and the house utilities. This space has a
foundation made of river rocks (which make the place look very lumpy all
around) that are covered over in layers of white dry-lock on top of which are
layers of bright spray paint graffiti, and it has a fairly high ceiling of about
thirteen feet-which is kind of unusual for a row house. It is enormously musty
and damp even in the cold months. I like to come down there a lot, mostly to
just sit and think. I like to work all over the house really when I make the
Art Things, but it’s good to keep a central location.
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| I Knew Only in Sleep / Ink Drawing on Glass 2013 / Radocaj |
I have
reviewed my time at PAFA and the works I created extensively down in this
cavern. The greater the distance of time I put between myself and what I make
helps me asses it better. [It is this time that has recently enabled me over
the last few weeks to record this assemblage of words.] Ernst Fischer had this
great line in ‘The Necessity of Art’: “…all art is conditioned by time, and
represents humanity….Like the world itself, [it is] not only a contradictory discontinuum,
but also a continuum.” I did not know it at the time but last year I absorbed
more than I thought I did in the Downtown Studio. I really felt like I had to
have been missing something at the time. But I wasn’t. I know that I wanted to
express ideas and solve problems through making Art. Which was great and
ambitious but I was not sure about how to do that precisely. Retrospectively perhaps I did not yet have the
right amount of focus, or I wasn’t refined-especially on the borderline
“conceptual” Art Things. But I don’t think I was that far off. Now, I love
looking at all of my work and the Ink drawings, which I felt very insecure
about at the time.
Through the
most marvelous drawing educator I have ever met I found my gravity. Over the
months he saw my drawings refine than radically change and refine than change
again and he figured out what I needed. He pointed me towards three artists who
I did not know or needed to rediscover and I embraced everything about them.
Their philosophies, what they did, and I enjoyed meditating about that. Those
periods that seemed too self indulgent at the time, helped me to teach the
language of visual I wanted to speak, to myself. “Matta, Tobey, Twombly” was my daily mantra. [To the Reader: this is
pronounced -‘Ma·ta·toe·Beau·iE·Tu·Wahoo·Mmmblie’
but the real portmanteau is still underdevelopment.] What began as a creating
Art from a place of only as record of experiencing creation a lines path,
developed into a profoundly amazing series of Art Works.
Matta gave
me the idea that I could convey some notion that my lines that could represent my Artist's psyche as a kind of interior
landscape but which is departed and distilled from what I directly experience
around me in the physical-such as an exterior scene or interior place-but not. Tobey
redefined my personal principals about Asian calligraphy, line walking, and mark
making for the simplest satisfaction. I
was able to make hundreds of interwoven brush strokes; the repetition of stroke
and lines themselves gave me the chance to create a vibratory space which had
the multiple degrees of mobility, points of entry and exit. And nourished me to
express my personal belief system about the daily ritual of creating Art.
Twombly pointed me towards large-scale, freely scribbled, the merging of the calligraphic
and the graffiti-like. And I was able
to be purged from the figurative aspects about Art and allegory and explore an
almost simplified form of abstraction myself. All of these things helped me in
the development of a technique of gestural and repetitive ink drawing that felt
emotional and enriching in the sometimes expansive then collapsing. I realize
now I was so enriched by the making of it.
Whereupon I hear a witty Limey actor say:
“What is a critic if not a person who reads too quickly, arrogantly, but never
wisely?”
I scream and
I laugh and jot it down in my moleskine for later consumption; I was watching
‘Cloud Atlas’. To me, there is almost nothing more pleasurable than watching a
movie that I have no preconceived ideas about what story is coming. I learned
later that the director purposefully added that line in anticipation of the
panning by theatrical critics, which the film did receive many. I was connected
to that line, but not fully. I was very saddened that my final review last
semester was so limp and a hard miss. I very nearly wanted to walk, especially
since my work was very significant to me, but no one else seemed to think so. When
I returned to my studio again I went through my books, notes, sketches, and
Drawings. I had already fortified myself over the break, and I immediately
began to start again.
The critics
are tough because they have seen a lot and they know a lot, there isn’t a way
to get anything past them. Critics don’t
necessarily read fast, they just read a lot. All the good ones are not arrogant
and are wise. In all their sage wisdom they drop its easy to forget that the
business of knowledge, experience, and perception dropping must be very
exhausting. Mental work is MUCH harder than physical work. So when they drop a
great load of ideas onto the top of your ideas in front of you it is easy to
become overwhelmed by it. Best advice: after the shock wears off go through the
pile and divide it all up--things you need, things you save, and things you
chuck. (If you don’t need it chuck it, simple as that.)
One day on
the way home from downtown I acquired two more dogs and they were very small. One
had fine hair that was blond and grey with a small scrunched face, the other
was all smooth and sand colored who I could hold in my hand. They were both timid
and quiet and friendly, but I kept losing them. Everyday they kept turning up
in odd places like in grocery bags and in thrown away coffee cups. I would have
to jump off high buildings into trash piles to save them from torturous child
people and wicked birds. I liked them very much, but I kept them to only to
protect them. I met a pack of little rubbery turtle people later. They were
very kind and tidy folks, and the seemed very keen to have them. I had a very
good feeling about them so I gladly gave the dogs to the odd family. I don’t
think I ever want little dogs.
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| Binding the Habituation (photographed while in progress) / Wire & Plastics Sculpture 2014 / Radocaj |
Whereupon I drink lots of tea and find neon yellow pipe cleaners are incredibly useful.
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| Binding the Habituation (photographed at completion) / Wire & Plastics Sculpture 2014 / Radocaj |
Whereupon the Dædra Titans
come into the world solely to eat people; Humanity is on the brink of
extinction.
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| Self Portrait in New Mexico or Arizona Shop / Digital Photography 2013 / Radocaj |
The whole block
shook with a tremendous terror. It was that every aircraft for miles vortex and
slammed into the ground all around the house. All of the lights flickered went
out and dimly came back; dimly and barely. The sounds of the wrecks is not what
drew me to the window, it was throngs of men and women screaming.
Titans. I
knew instantly that’s what they were. The Goya painting of ‘Titan Cronus’
Devouring Jupiter’ was barley the gravity of the scene on the other side of the
glass. They were thirty feet high some looked fifty; in the distance through
the fire and smoke I knew they had to have been nearly 100 feet because they
were well over the houses. Naked, happy, feral. Pushing their hands and arms
into windows, feeling about and pulling my neighbors out to bight them in half,
sucking out the insides. Teams of five
or six were herding people into small brick outcrops around houses and
alleyways, picking each person up and shoveling them two fisted into their
mouths like they were berries.
Whereupon any vague suicidal thoughts
all begin to become missed opportunities.
Wojo! Where
is he? The gate is opened and he and the dogs are gone. Our front door is gone;
the houselights are spilling onto the snow on the front steps. A smell of
frankincense mixed with burnt hair fills the room. I turn and see a Dædra Titan
Lord inside the room with me. He is naked, muscles spiked out in jagged angles
like armor, entirely black but, his eyes have no iris or pupils and are all green
like his teeth. His shadow casts a Mojave Lizard across the walls and the whole
room is bending to his size. I am frightened. This thing brought the Titans
here and controls them. He says the most horrible things to me.
Whereupon my corn-hole saves the
situation.
“Anti-Predator Adaptation This refers to
mechanisms developed over time through evolution, assisting prey organisms in
their constant struggle against predators. Throughout the animal kingdom,
adaptations have evolved for every stage of this struggle in order to maximize
prey survival.
A class of anti-predator adaptations is predator
deterrence, which can be divided into two major categories: morphological and
behavioral defenses. Both of these types of defenses have evolved through
natural selection because they increase the fitness of the prey…thus results in
the persistence of the trait in the population over time.
Morphological defenses involve structural adaptations
such as horns, spikes, stingers, claws, fangs and toxins. Some morphological
defenses utilize aspects of the prey's appearance to avoid detection. These
strategies include camouflage and mimicry.
Behavioral defenses involve acts performed by the prey
to avoid predation. These defenses include actions such as pursuit deterrent
signals.” –Wikipedia
I pull the
neck of my tee-shirt over my head to my hairline raise my hands towards the
ceiling and in an intentionally spastic, irritating voice begin: “Are you threatening
me? Zzaa! I am the Great Cornholio! Cornholio-ooo-o!! Cornholio! I need TP. You
have no bung hole. Bungholio!“
His face,
mouth, and entire body posture dropped limp; like he was hit in the head with a
railroad spike but the rest of his nervous system hadn’t somehow caught up to
that information.
“That is how
ridiculous you are. So you know what, hang on to that thought, Sir. Why don’t
you try to kill me another day, OK? Just go. I don’t need this information that
you, Sir, are-a-give’n. So go.”
Everything
goes quiet everything goes dark. I eat a lettuce leaf and make my bed in a warm
pile of sand that floats down a river of electricity.
Whereupon I become a Titan.
I battle,
defeat, and eat only other Titans.
So that is
that.
That’s my
Studio Art Practice.
The End.
What am I currently reading…
‘Other Minds’ by Alec Hyslop much to my own
surprise because I have a distain of most philosophy. It is sort of about how
people function in gaining or avoiding sharing knowledge with each other. This
is significant to me because a lot of what my studio time is devoted to this
year is exploring themes about openness as it pertains to personal and communal
human sexuality.
‘Flavit et Dissipati Sunt’ (or ‘He Blew and They Were
Scattered’) by Joan Copjec. I think it is a work about psychological analysis
with philosophical interpretations about the manifestations, portrayal, and
interpretations of intense emotions of the feminine gender through history.
It’s a hard run I am on my second try. But the contributions about dream states
and interpretations, how the perception of the female mind and emotions and all
the disconnections and inconsistency’s that the norm of society has been
reacted to, and mimesis theory feels relevant to what I am working on but I yet
cannot articulate it well enough.
‘Theory, Ideology, Politics: Art History and its Myths’ by Griselda Pollock. Honestly, I have only so far skimmed it but it looks good and feels good.
