“Beneath the Underdog”
nature mort with dog’s head and lotus blossom ITIN 2005

It’s been a strange couple of days. The dog had surgery on Friday to remove a large and growing lipoma on her tiny stick-like legs. She’s been deformed and nick-named “lumpy” for months, but when the tumor kept growing at a rate that her skin couldn’t match, she had to go under the knife. Picking her up from the Vietnam Veternarian – she was stoned and wounded immaculate (with a ridicoulous smile on her droopy dog-eyed face). Seeing her helpless and lost sent me back in time to the two years when my dad was fighting cancer. It brought up the sad dissolution of that time: the passivity of watching some one you love in pain, or worse dying…

The body is a language sculpture. It is a thing built from a circular story – the double helix code that tells a stomach to be a stomach, the liver a liver, the brain a brain and the heart to be a heart. When the grammar of that language breaks down and the body starts to babble to itself, the body grows in chaotic, nonsensical ways. That is what cancer is.

Watching a loved one’s body language turn meaningless, can cause all meaning to evaporate for the viewer… Least wise, it did that for me. I went sort of crazy for a while after watching my old man die. Looking at the dog standing there in the middle of the snowy streets not knowing where she was, or what to do, or how to move forward, turned the water on in my eyes. It was pretty much my own state after the old man finally died. It was one of those Citizen Kane in the hall mirror moments…epiphany. The dog is my father, I am the dog and on and on. A rose is a rose is a rosebud.

The loss of meaning basically sent me around a bend and a sort of self destructive suicidal bender. I howled into Paris, where instead of dying, I fell in love with painting again and also ended up falling in love with writing again and photography, and film, and poetry and anything and everything else including my girlfriend. Anyway when you’re in love with all media thinking about paint and thinking about glue seems a jolly boring thing to do.

Andy Warhol
David Bowie
Marshall McLuhan
Tennesse Williams

signal 66

There is a great scene in Full Metal Jacket where Private Joker talks to some Colonel, or General, who comments:
“Son you wear a peace sign on your helmet and you write next to it: ‘Born TO Kill’.”
“Sir, Yes, Sir!”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of a sick JOKE?”
“Sir, No, Sir.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well you had better get your head wired to your asshole or I will take a giant shit on you. What does it mean soldier? Figure it out, or you’ll be standing tall befoe the man.”
“Sir, I believe it has something to do with the duality of man, Sir”
“The Duality of What?”
“You know, that Jungian thing? The duality of Man?”
“Who’s side are you on, boy?”
“Our side, sir……….”

So somthing about the Christo Gates struck me again….they are like military standards: the things you’ve seen in Kurosawa films and with knights in shining armor…

…And yes Romans and speaking of which, Ben Hur was on last night and it reminded me that the Kubrick painting is not only a stage to stand on, but eventually a wheel of a chariot. Sort of like Giacometti’s great Chariot piece. I want to put a rubber tread around the tondé and make a Rauchenberg like scroll print….anyway that’s the idea.

Ezeakeal for Stanely Kubrick mixed media on canvas ITIN(work in progress)

I’ve been working pretty hard on editing my little study in Orange. Christo, Jean and Claude (they are the trinity: father, mother, super ego). I had a sighting of Jean Claude in the snow and I got her orange hair in the movie. Orange is the big fashion statement now.

Editing a movie always gets me thinking about Stanley Kubrick. Also I have A Clock Work Orange on DVR….So I am watching small bits of it and it keeps me very humble about my stupid I-MOVIE. But I believe in Dumb Angles and I heard someone calling the gates a big SMILE. So all this has me thinking of late modernism and the dream of the sixties…..and these loones who keep banging there head against the wall untill the wall moves.

Editing the film I started to see the gates as notes of music,pages of a book, frames of film, ancient city gates, Kong’s gate, the set for Intolerance and Gone With The Wind, and then finally protest placards. It is as if Art went on Strike and decided to protest in the park (like we all tried to do during the Republican Convention). In some ways it is just a stroll in the park, but I like to think of it as a march. A Parade. A happy protest. A turn towards revolution. Mona Lisa’s Smile.

Here is a strange “accident” from the New York Times Week In Reveiw. The drawing by Francis Crick of the structure of DNA echoes an illustration from the Op Ed page on the reverse. Some how the spiral of life is perfectly aligned with a missle depicting the new members of the a-bomb club (North Korea, Iran, Israel, etc.) I am interested in accidental collisions of images that seem to inform each other.

What’s it saying? Is the code of self destruction written in us?

Allowing these accidental revelations is one of the more interesting things about combining multi media elements.

eggman, ink on postcard ITIN ’05

Willoughby (still – video over ink drawing) work in progress ©ITIN

Promenade ©ITIN

Painting for Akira Kurosawa ‘O3 75″x90″ oil on canvas (Munshani Collection)

Willoughby wakes up and Willoughby hears Dexter Gordon and Willoughby says: “I don’t want to die.”

When the girlfriend left for work, I flipped from the news to see what I could hear (morning being a great time for music videos). Round Midnight was on somewhere and so our man in Paris serenaded me up and down and in and out of dreams to where the wild things are….I mean I kept falling asleep during the dialogue and waking up for the extended performance sequences (that dream band with Herbie Hancock on piano). When I’d finally decided to truly get up and make the coffee, I was thinking about how Round Midnight is one of the few films that actually stops doing its narrative work long enough to let a full on improvisational jazz performance happen….I have at times been in different places with this film: like this morning where I was more interested in the music and other times where I was more interested in the characters. It struck me that one should be able to make a thing that could be a song, or a story depending on the whim of the reader…..or sleeper. Like some one at Basel Fasnacht choosing which pied piper (or drummer) to follow through the three a.m. ancient alleys.

I’d been staring at the orange gates (editing video and shooting and walking more) that it was nice to see the color contrast blue of Paris. Never was there a bluer city…..not even blue Hawaii (though I’ve been blue in both). I’d been watching the street sweepers suck up the drifts of confetti from the Basel streets. The only thing more depressing than the end of carnival, is watching the end of a carnival you weren’t at. There is something however in the ability to wander Fasnacht by web cam (ten nodes) and Christo’s gates that seems useful to the creation of an e-book.

I’ve been pondering the gates as pages, or nodes (chapters in a TK3 book?). I have a feeling that the expeience of them may lead to some solution as to how to make a multiple stream narrative. This may be very helpful in Making Om Egg and possibly even Willoughby.

©ITIN

Well we’re all feeling a little sleep deprived around here. For the first time in recent memory mardi gras has made it to new york in the form of christo’s gates. While there’s not a lot of beads, nor jazz, nor the exposing of breasts, there is a sort of parade a foot in Central Park…..but as with any good winter carnival: YOU ARE THE PARADE. No standing around waiting for floats, or oversized balloons, or marching bands, you just walk and look at the other people walking and really the gates serve as a sort of framing device for the park and the people in it, including YOU.

It is a sort of reimagined urban space that allows you to reimagine the urban populace. It dresses them in different clothes. Painter, Stephen E. Lewis said to me the day before they went up, “Hey man they’re a hell of an effort, but from what I saw of the drawings, man, they’re just window treatments.”

I’ll give Steve that point, but the windows needed a little treatment at this point. I’ve been looking through a cracked, fogged, filthy set of windows with the shades pulled down…..more or less since 911 and definitely since the last presidential election. So orange you glad they finally put up the gates?

They seem to create a different resopnse in every viewer. They are like thousands of little orange Rashomon gates all in a row. Some love – some hate, but at least new york is talking about art.

Many of us at the institute were treated to a sun rise viewing of the gates; complete late night dancing beforehand, Mud truck coffee in the cold February park wind, and a brunch at the temporary offices of The Institute (in other words bob’s apartment). We all had a wonderful time, but I for one, am still feeling it. (of course my girlfriend went to FLA last week while I was left alone for five days trying to write a artist in residence grant for Eyebeam – either one of these things could have sent me into a sleepless fit of the screaming mimis, but together they were a sort one two insomnia punch).

I’ve been waking up every night a four for four days. So it was nice to have an excuse to be with other people at that ungodly hour. There is something about waking up in the dark and gathering to experience an event that is very magical. You are out of your normal place in space and time. The world is an oyster, or a clam….I can’t remember, I was half asleep and still dreaming

Finnegan’s Wake …pros and cons of hitchhiking

The next day was both Valentine’s day and the first day of Fasnacht in Basel, Switzerland (place of origin of my family name and my dear old dead dad). This is a medievil lent carnival that is very particular to the town (home of art fairs, graphic design revolutions, and birth place of LSD). The normally serious Swiss wake up and throng into the old part of the city near the Marktplatz: Many of them are carrying drums and fifes and masks with candles, or electric lights affixed to them. All through the city enormous painted lantern/signs have been stashed. At exactly four in the morning all the lights of the city are turned out and the costumes and lanterns are lit and the Basel Cliques put on their masks and thousands of drums and fifes begin to play one song together. The whole mass of masked characters and the people who are there to watch them start to move, but they don’t move along a route….each group goes its own way, each person follows whoever he wants, and often jumps ship to move along with a different set of minstrels After the first unison song is played, each clique (there are some 150) plays what ever tune it wants. WIth all these drums and fifes and later brass bands marching in thin stone medievil streets (called gasse), it is very loud…the music is always shiffting and changing and ringing in your ears. It makes the whole techno club thing seem pretty tame. Now this constant spectacle of sights and sounds and food and wine and confetti and kirsh and political humor and poetry goes on for three days! Every night till five in the morning and then back at it by ten. It is truly crazy! It is a strangely somber thing too….very Swiss German, very obsessed with death and ghosts and scary visions.

Anyway, there is something about this self directed wandering through a spectacle: weather it be Christo’s gates in New York, or Fasnacht in Basel that I want to inform my work in the more intimate spectacle of an e-book, or interactive video. I have a feeling that Fasnacht, at least, will be coming up a lot in this blog, but for right now the portal point is the orange crate art that is scattered all over central park.

Walk through….don’t be scared.