rulururu

post Seeing is Forgetting

July 18th, 2008

Filed under: slow art, blather — Matthew Landkammer @ 5:53 am

Seeing is ForgettingI have just re-re-read (is that right? third time through) Lawrence Weschler’s classic “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,” a biography of Robert Irwin. I consider myself an Irwin fan, though I admittedly have still not made the trip across town to see the re-installed “Nine Spaces, Nine Trees,” which was formerly sited at the old Public Safety Building in an unfortunate location, where it earned the nickname “Jail for Trees.” Shame on me, really for not making the trip yet.

Anyway, I was getting ready to go to the airport for a weekend trip to Chicago, I didn’t have a book to read, and magazines just sounded boring, so I looked through the books out in the studio, and decided to read this one again. The runner-up was Agnes Martin’s “Writings”, which I have also since re-re-read, and will be the subject of another post.

First off, if you have never read Weschler, you need to. Whether it’s this book, the one about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, or the one about Boggs who draws detailed copies of currency, each one is a treat. Weschler has a way of bringing his subject to life on the page that is casual without being simple. Descriptions fail me, but it is pure skill.

Back to Irwin: It was a good refresher to read this again - to understand the narrative curve of Irwin’s artistic life. And I guess honestly, my motivation for reading this again, now, is that I feel as if I am at a crossroads. So the passages about those moments in Irwin’s life where things changed — or didn’t, but could have — were the ones that struck me:

In this context, we can look at the late line paintings in two ways. On the one hand, they constitute the beginning of a phenomenological investigation that was to take Irwin, over the next decade, through a succession of reductions — through the dots, discs, columns, rooms, desert experiments, and city projects that were to follow — all the way to ground zero, achieved somewhere in the mid-seventies, when Irwin declared that nonobjective art now meant “nonobject,” and that perception itself, independent of any object, was the true art act. But another way of seeing those late lines is to realize that they themselves were that ground zero, that in a period of two years Irwin had achieved a complete revolution in his thinking, and that everything that was to follow was merely an acting out, a fleshing out of the discoveries he had made with them, discoveries the implications of which it took him another decade to unfurl.

In any case, biographically, the late lines constitute the fulcrum of Irwin’s artistic career. ” All my activities after those line paintings,” Irwin concedes, “are a result of how those paintings taught me to look at the world.” This was true on the obvious level, that is, they taught him how to perceive the world in a new way. “When I look at the world now, my posture is not one of focus but rather of attention. There’s a floating kind of feeling when I work in a situation now.” But there was also a more subtle (and pervasive) transformation, that of his driving motive. When Irwin initially joined Ferus — the reason he left Landau in the first place — he was animated principally by ambition. He was fiercely competitive: he wanted to be the best goddamn abstract expressionist on the block. something happened, though, over the next several years. He got hooked on what he was doing: curiosity came to supersede ambition as his principal motivation. It has stayed that way ever since.

“Those lines,” Irwin is likely to grin nowadays, “that was where, at age thirty-five, I finally grew up and became an artist.”

And, years later, an even more profound turning point:

Irwin returned to Los Angeles, to his Venice studio, where the “Skylights-Column” installation was still up. It didn’t make sense anymore. Something was wrong. For twelve years he had been pursuing a course of inquiry, each question opening out onto the next, the lines to the dots to the discs to the columns, but after the Modern Art piece, a fundamental transformation occurred. He had been following the questions through; now he was about to follow them straight out.

“It had been a long journey,” Irwin summarizes, “starting out from my more or less naive approach as a painter to now be arriving at a point where, to some degree, I had dismantled the whole thing: image, line, frame, focus, transcendability. I’d dismantled the art endeavor, but in the process I’d dismantled myself. My questions had now become way in excess of any answers that I had, or even any possibilities. In fact, I arrived at this point with a real dilemma, and the dilemma was that all my questions now seemed external to my practice. The column not being successful is a good example. And it seemed to me that, if I continued doing what I was doing, I was simply never going to get to my questions. I would simply do those things, maybe better, or I’d extend them, maybe richer. So I really had a decision to make at that point, and it was a fairly radical one in my life. See, I felt that if each day I got up and went down the street, the same street basically, and went into that studio, which was a particular scale and size, a room, and so on and so forth, and if I brought with me all my expertise — which is what you can’t help but do in a situation like that, bring all the things you’ve learned to be good at (and I’d learned a lot of techniques) — that I would essentially continue to do the same thing. And I didn’t know exactly how to resolve that. But what I did was the simplest kind if thing — which was not an answer, but I think fairly reasonable given the dilemma — and that was to get rid of all those habits and practices altogether.

“I cut the knot. I got rid of the studio, sold all the things I owned, all the equipment, all my stuff; and without knowing what I was going to do with myself or how I was going to spend my time, I simply stopped being an artist in those senses. I just quit.”

Note that Irwin says that, through dismantling the art endeavor, he dismantled himself. This ties back to other recent reading of mine, as well, and has been an important “ah-ha” moment for me: the process I go through (essentially painting the same painting over and over again, for the past seven years) has not been a process of making the paintings better, although I believe that has happened in some cases. Rather, it is a process of making my self better. More precisely, the repetition has made my self less.

I have an old friend — and an excellent draughtsman — whom I rarely see anymore. He has to some degree dropped out of art circles, and when asked about it, says (I have heard this through the grapevine) that he has “pulled a Landkammer.” What he means is that he isn’t at all the openings and art parties like we both used to be. Our names are rarely on anybody’s lips. When I run into folks I know from the “art world,” they sometimes ask if I am still making art.

I relate this to make a point: in the art community, ambition is expected (and — I have to admit — somewhat necessary). When that ambition shifts and becomes an internal ambition, the evidence of ambition is not as apparent, and others assume that there is no fire left in the belly. In some cases — maybe most — that’s the case. But not always.

post Say What?

June 28th, 2008

Filed under: blather — Matthew Landkammer @ 5:47 am

ear

I have what I believe to be my first-ever ear infection. I have not verified the accuracy of this with my mother, but I believe this to be so. It started with a cold last Friday, then by Monday, my sinuses were full of crap, and on Tuesday I took a round-trip flight to San Francisco and thought the right side of my head was going to rupture like an Edgerton apple.

This, beyond discomfort, has caused partial deafness in the right ear, and a constant ringing known as tinnitus. While the doctor said my eardrum looked “angry”, he didn’t indicate any actual damage. So I expect that once all the swelling goes down my hearing will return to normal.

What’s interesting about all this, and the reason I’m writing a post about it on my studio blog, is that tinnitus is the ability to hear the process of hearing in the absence of adequate auditory inputs. So, in effect, since my hearing mechanism is still functioning fine from a nervous system perspective, but because my eardrum and middle ear aren’t right, my hearing is straining to hear, and when it strains like that, it hears itself.

All of this may not be dissimilar from the twitchy little visual quivers one gets (at least I do) when looking at a field where visual purchase is hard to come by. If the visual field is “slippery” or ganzfeld-like, then our vision plays similar tricks on us.

Because a still awareness of the act of seeing is part of what I am after when I paint, this little insight I got from my ear infection is the silver lining in the pain.

post One-Armed Bandit

April 5th, 2008

Filed under: studio/process, blather — Matthew Landkammer @ 6:15 am

I haven’t posted for a while. One could be forgiven for thinking I had abandoned the project. This is typical for me — after I mount a show, I generally take a little time off from the studio. It’s a period of regeneration and reflection.

Maybe that’s putting a little too much gloss on it — it’s a period of reflection, uncertainty, trepidation, worry, and ultimately regeneration. For me, and for my experience of the practice of painting, this is normal. (And I do want to clarify something for the other artists out there — this is not post-show blues. I find that those usually come the day after the opening, and many of you will know what I mean. Post-show blues are related to the letdown kids have the day after their birthday.)

Rather, this is a recurring minor existential crisis.

This ends one of three ways:

1. I continue what I have been doing.
2. I do something different.
3. I stop.

Number three, while always on the table, is also always the least likely. Number two happens sometimes. Number one happens most often.

Choosing option number one sounds simple, but it isn’t. Choosing to do what I have been doing is always an act of faith — faith that I am on a path, and not in a rut. Faith that slow progress is progress nonetheless. Faith that the act of pushing on will not only change the work, but will change my self.

I’ve heard it said that one definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. If that’s the case, my painting practice is sometimes a slot machine.

post Pulling Paint

March 14th, 2008

Filed under: colleagues — Matthew Landkammer @ 5:52 pm

I showed with Philip Lynam in a two-person show in DC back in 2001. He dropped a comment on one of my posts the other day. It was good to take a look and see what he has been up to. He layers using squeegees, but I can’t tell you much more about his process. Maybe he’ll tell us more in the comments of this post, yeah? Here’s a recent piece of his:

fin

Fin
12″ x 12″
2007

post Holding on to Nothing: Installed

March 9th, 2008

Filed under: recent work — Matthew Landkammer @ 6:20 am

True to form, I had my camera in my pocket for the entire opening the other night, and never remembered to pull it out and take a shot. There were people there. Really.

I stopped by the gallery yesterday to check in and take a few installation shots. Also, wanted to see how the bench worked out… Sam brought in a bench from home, and put it in the space. We left it in back for the reception, but now it is out on the floor. It’s a visual cue to pause and take some time with the work, though whether that will be effective is anyone’s guess.

It’s great to see all the pieces in the space I have been envisioning them in for two years as I put together this body of work:

install 1

install 2

install 3

install 4

post Show Page

March 5th, 2008

Filed under: recent work — Matthew Landkammer @ 7:33 am

I’ve posted selected works on the show page for Holding on to Nothing. The opening is tomorrow from 6-8, if you’re in Seattle.

post Load-in

March 1st, 2008

Filed under: studio/process — Matthew Landkammer @ 8:56 pm

Joel

After a little bit of varnishing last night and an early Home Depot run this morning to re-build the cross-braces for the big painting, I rented a U-Haul and loaded all the work down to the gallery today. Somehow, I managed to convince my friend Joel to help. He’s a professional (for real) at this sort of thing, as evidenced by the photo of him crawling under my painting in the truck to tie off the stretcher bar on the bottom. I can’t even tell you how much easier this was with Joel involved.

Now it’s just waiting for the opening on Thursday, and rambling around my very empty studio…

post Meet My Little Friend

February 26th, 2008

Filed under: studio/process — Matthew Landkammer @ 8:11 am

friend

This is my little friend. It’s a Gerber hard plastic squeegee for applying adhesive vinyl graphics. Or, at least, that’s what it was designed to do. But this little tool gets more use in my studio than almost anything else.

When I am preparing a canvas, after I have applied several layers of my gesso/matte medium mixture with a roller, I spread on thin coats of the stuff with this tool to fill in all the depressions. Alternating coats scraped on this way with wet sanding, I can create a very smooth surface.

Similarly, when a painting is completed, I apply several layers of matte medium as an isolating layer, first with a roller, then scraped-on layers with the squeegee. Alternating with wet sanding, I get a very smooth surface before applying the varnish.

It also comes in handy when I’m claeaning off the residue from wet sending. I spray on water with a spray bottle, then squeegee it off with this little guy. (See video below.)

You can see how the business edge of the squeegee is shorter than the other side. Eventually, this thing will be a stub, and I will need another one. I suspect that adhesive vinyl graphics are becoming less common, so I wonder if I will have trouble finding a replacement…

post Holding on to Nothing

February 19th, 2008

Filed under: artist statements — Matthew Landkammer @ 6:57 am

wile e coyote

1. Not holding anything, non-attachment

2. Holding on to something of no value; unnecessary attachment

3. Having no toehold; working without a net

4. Exhalation; release

5. Having a grasp of no-thing; understanding nothingness

6. Abandon

post this in conjunction with that

February 9th, 2008

Filed under: slow art, colleagues — Matthew Landkammer @ 8:46 am

wisp

Wisp
oil on canvas
21.5″x21.5″
Julie Alexander, 2006

A nice recent painting from a Seattle colleague - Julie Alexander. Julie and I have shown together in group shows a long time ago; both her work and mine have changed a lot over those years. A choice line from her artist’s statement:

At the painting’s surface there is a multiplicity - a this in conjunction with that. The lines assert and deny narrative.

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