Zak Smith's Blog, page 2
January 22, 2012
M John Harrison has a new book coming out called Empty Sp...
M John Harrison has a new book coming out called Empty Space. Here's his blurb:
"If you didn't like Light because of the sex, don't get Empty Space. If you didn't like Light because of a perceived "coldness" don't get Empty Space. If you can't navigate yourself morally, politically & emotionally without three sentences of direction for every sentence that furthers the action, don't get Empty Space."
Sex, coldness, and no hand-holding. What more could you ask for?
Anyway: I'll be in Chicago Feb 2-3. I'm doing a thing at the School of the Art Institue of Chicago.
"If you didn't like Light because of the sex, don't get Empty Space. If you didn't like Light because of a perceived "coldness" don't get Empty Space. If you can't navigate yourself morally, politically & emotionally without three sentences of direction for every sentence that furthers the action, don't get Empty Space."
Sex, coldness, and no hand-holding. What more could you ask for?
Anyway: I'll be in Chicago Feb 2-3. I'm doing a thing at the School of the Art Institue of Chicago.
January 4, 2012
I Wrote This About Rick Santorum 3 Years Ago:Another thin...
I Wrote This About Rick Santorum 3 Years Ago:
--from We Did Porn, 2009
Another thing Trixie's attention deficit disorder makes her susceptible to is Candy's very large breasts (not implants--this is alt porn). Her eyes will periodically light up and she will surge toward them with some expression of avid disbelief and then bury herself in them for distracted seconds like a fruit bat hanging by its teeth from the drum-tight red of a suspended treat--while Candy, still both-handedly controlling her controller, giggles benevolently over her head and counsels her to remain calm. Nearly every girl in the industry did this once they were on any kind of decent terms with Candy, but with Trixie, whose consciousness is consciously, cyclically, and forgetfully auditing all five senses for incoming data, the effect is exaggerated.
This sort of behavior is, according to what I'd seen earlier that day, what the junior senator from Pennsylvania would call "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family."
On occasions such as this one, it is not uncommon for Trixie to then look down, cup her own fist-sized teardrop tits, and pensively assess them. Her nipples are interesting. When erect, it appears as if one nipple is concentrically set atop another, fatter, pinker nipple. Though they had been produced by an unhealthy, unstable, traditional family, it is difficult to know whether the senator would say that the nipples themselves are so fascinating that they are by their very essence antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. However, there is no question that in their current profession as functional constituents of an adult performer--and since the senator, whose last name is a homonym for an unfortunate consequence of anal sex, is philosophically opposed to all entertainments featuring characters even approvingly discussing nonprocreative sex and believes that the First Amendment should be interpreted as having a three-tiered structure--he would have them considered, at the very least, a controlled substance. (He would lose.)
In that case, one would normally be inclined to say that the shirt that Trixie is now borrowing from me and putting on, having worn the same shirt for two days, is an ally of healthy, stable, traditional families, covering, as it did, the nipples. However, Deuteronomy 22:5 clearly states that "A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the Lord your God." You see, Trixie is wearing the kind of shirt that does not merely advertise Batman but that has his emblem across the chest as if she is Batman. In coincidental symmetry, I happen to be wearing a shirt, which experts would recognize through very subtle indications (gray field, yellow bat), that implies I am Batgirl. Candy wears, in a kind of sidecar coincedence parallel to the motorcycle it portrays, her own Batgirl shirt (which does actually depict the character in question, chasing nothing down the sheer and twistless ridgeline parkway of her boobs). All of this suggest an undertone of transvestitism and batgirl-on-girl action about this now-entirely-clothed scene, which may be antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family--even without considering that both of the girls' shirts are very tight at any rate and that Batman admirably did what he had set out to do with his life despite his parents being shot dead in Crime Alley by Joe Chill on a foggy night in Gotham City.
--from We Did Porn, 2009
December 21, 2011
Questions from Facebook fans:Q: Is there an avant garde a...
Questions from Facebook fans:
Q: Is there an avant garde anymore?
A: If you mean artists making good new work that should influence how the world will look, then yes. If you mean, Do they all know each other
and are they all employed as fine artists? No. I'd say about 10% of the avant garde are employed in the fine arts--most have fled to film, animation,
illustration, design, architecture and elsewhere after a sort of anticreativity pogrom that's been going on in the fine arts since the modern gallery
system emerged and realized it was only equipped to sell one or two styles at any given time.
Q: In terms of your career, what was a major step for you in making it into the higher echelon galleries, and selling your work?
A: It was a three-step process:
Step one: filling out the federal loan forms so I could go to Yale.
Step two: not dying while there. (It was easy, New Haven is not a tough town.)
Step three: one of the teachers who wasn't trying to kick me out liked me.
Q: Did it change anything about your practice?
A: No. Most people have a pretty good practice in school and get a lot done, then they get out of school and it does change their
practice because they have to work for a living. The luxury of having a gallery is you get to act like you're in school again.
Q: Do rich folks deserve all the good paintings?
A: Short answer-No.
Long answer-
2002: The 1st painting I ever had in a gallery. They said: How much? I said 6000$. They said: That's crazy. I said: That's minimum wage.
And that was federal minimum wage--not even the minimum wage for the state I was in. And the gallery takes half of that--and then taxes.
In Europe, they're willing to pay artists to make stuff--like in Sweden they will pay you a stipend if you just say you're in a band. But over here? The budget for
military music is bigger than the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. That means America would rather pay a marine to play John Phillip
Sousa on the trombone than see something new.
And, honestly, if the new thing is gonna be more Felix Gonzalez Torres, it's hard to blame them.
I mean, asking people who just got fired from a bank to pay taxes so the NEA can fund more art that looks a lot like a bank does seem kinda cruel.
The solution is clear: stop making bad art and/or smash the state. I'll help out with either.
Q: You're work takes an insane amount of patience. Are you ocd, and if so how else does it effect your life?
A: Im not OCD. In my experience OCD people don't get much done because they're too busy cleaning or interviewing assistants to make their shit for them.
The D in OCD stands for disorder because it dissociates means from ends. Order is only ever a means to an end, and the end is getting shit done. The OCD
person is failing to get shit done.
Professional art interpreters like to spread the idea that artists are crazy so that no-one will listen carefully to what artists say and the ainterpreters can maintain
job security. In reality, if you like my work, then you know why I make it: I want to see it, just like you. The only difference is you're luckier--someone's
already making the thing you want to see for you so you don't have to make it yourself.
Q: Is it significant that the planet earth is in a 'dead' part (non-star
producing) of a mostly dead (non-new-star producing) galaxy? And what
will happen to all of that art when the oceans boil and the mountains
melt? And should I be worrying about this?
A: Short answers: No. It will cease to be. No.
Long answer: Worrying about what the world--art- or otherwise- will be like after you're
dead rather than what you are going to look at while you're alive is probably responsible
for more bad art than THC, ancient Egypt and the Eastern Orthodox Church put together.
Q: Because of new discoveries in science, the end of space is expanding. Do you think it causes the growth of yourself or the growth of your outer frame? And the reason?
A: I really hope there's a language barrier issue here.
Q: While you are driving a car, you see a kitten ahead in your lane. She was hit by another car and her body is flat, but the head part is totally normal and crying at you. Which do you think is the right thing to do? Run over her head to finish her pain, or try to avoid her with believing a miracle?
This was what happened to me really, and I still cannot forget that.
A: Save the kitten. You never know.
It's like the search for extraterrestrial life: the chances of success are remote, but if you end up with a mostly flat cat but with a normal kitten head it'd be so worth it.
Q: Given that no one can say for sure what happens after we die, but
given that the better someone's imagination is the more complex a
picture they may be able to build of such a situation, what happens
after we die? (IE, give us some story about the underworld.)
A: Artists know what happens after you die: your prices go up and people you never met in glasses
pretend to know about you so they can get interviewed on public television.
Q: What's the best way to keep your brain-hand connection from rotting
when you just don't feel like drawing anything?
A; I generally go for my scissors. Not much comes of it, usually, but it's good to keep busy.
Cameras are pretty easy to come by these days, too.
Q: If stars talked to each other using some sort of interstellar email,
what would their words look like?
A: I am on fire and life is spawning around me and it is trying to see me but I burn its
eyes.
Q: When, in the far future, the human world is just One or Two
Governments vs. One or Two Mafia Families, plus all those poor plebs,
who will take over whom, and how?
A: Call me nuts but I'd put my money on whichever party manages to use
a threat of violence to maintain a monopoly over the means of
production.
So, pretty much the way it is now.
Q: Do you ever get Paranoia (the Pynchonian variety)? if so, when?
A: Pynchonian paranoia is that variety where you perceive all things as covertly and sinisterly
connected--and no, I don't get it much. I'm too busy worrying about all the things that're
overtly and sinisterly connected. Our last two wars were started in oil country by a
president who was an oil man and a vice president who ran a military logistics
company. Who needs conspiracy theories?
Q: Would you ever consider painting on bioplastic specifically so that
you could have an laugh about the conservation issues of such
paintings?
Poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) is biodegradable without residue.
personally i would love to see the time-lapse video of 100 years or
however long it took for something like that to just evaporate in the
middle of a museum.
A: It's enough work tryna cook the world's finest cheeseburger without worrying
about how it's arranged on the plate.
Q: I always feel i want to paint things i know people won't give a fuck
about. like the illyrians, for instance should i ignore those urges?
are they dead ends? or will the fact that
a handfull of history geeks go 'cool!' mean it's a good idea?
A: It's alarming how often I get questions like this--young artists
asking if they should make some art they want to make despite or because of the approval of various
allegedly interested or disinterested parties.
The only good thing about this job is you get to do whatever you want. If you can worry about
what somebody else want for 14 hours a day and still be happy, get another job--you might get
health care.
Q: At what point does abstraction and/or self-reflection defeat the purpose of artistic expression?
A: Can you clarify? I don't understand.
Q: The idea of expression, that of conveying information or feeling from one person to another, relies on some shared understanding comparable to language; if two people speak two completely different languages they simply cannot express themselves to each other. Similarly, if an artist's work is so abstracted or so completely focused on the internal, they may as well be speaking a language that only they understand. I was wondering what your thoughts were on that threshold of expressive futility, if you think there's a sort of artistic event horizon past which the artist's meaning cannot escape their own internal or abstracted focus and reach the minds of others.
A: That is a question worth answering at length and I will answer it, but I will provisionally say now that it rests entirely on the bizarre premise
that art is primarily an act of communication.
Ok. What I'm doing now is communicating. You are understanding what I'm saying. If I go 'I like shrimp' right now, you will understand how I stand with
regard to shrimp.
That's because English is actually a language. We use it to communicate--in dull and styleless declaratives--because it is really good at communicating. Art
may make things easier to remember, but it is terrible at communicating them to begin with.
You know why mathematicians all over the world have always understood the Pythagorean theorem? It's not a painting, that's why.
Look at the most well-known well-publicized works of art in the world: the very few people who even care what they mean are still fighting with
each other about what they mean to this day. In fact, just about the only way to get a degree in writing about art is to disagree with what everyone up
until you said about it. If you want to communicate, using art is the best way to be misunderstood.
Only a very sick and anhedonic society could decide art is about communication--do you bake cake to communicate? No, you bake it because you want to eat cake.
Now this idea has been confused because in advertising and journalism they use images to draw attention to ideas, which they then use words to
clarify. (Often in the form of captions.) This should confuse you no more than when a guy trying to sell you a car gives you a cookie shaped like
a car so you'll pay attention to him while he talks.
Another confusion is caused by the fact that, in order to explain how art or a cookie is made or why it tastes good or holds together, you may have
to get into some psychology or chemistry. But all the science in the world won't make it taste better. It can only explain what's already happening.
Many images speak a thousand words--Statue of Liberty--that's only because we have already heard the words and have been told to associate them
with that symbol when they see it.
Now if you really want to, you can use art to explain stuff--like they do with plumbing diagrams. You can also use a piece of dark chocolate to kill a dog
but, again, it doesn't really affect whether the chocolate's tasty or not.
So, yeah, fuck communication, make the cookie you wanna eat.
Q: Do you believe your art is more, or less sexual than Klimt's?
A: Well Klimt's pictures have all these parallel hairy paintstrokes which I think are about as sexual
as a beige wool bathrobe. But that's just me.
Q:In terms of emotion, what inspires your work? ( I know thats cheesy)
A: I think the more of your emotions you can transmute into work, the more work you get done. I get a lot done because I can run on almost
anything. I know artists who can only run on comfort or isolation. They don't get much done. Especially in this economy.
I need something relatively flat and something I can hold that makes marks on it. That's about it.
Q:At any given point, when is art not alive?
A:Please stop being a hippie. It won't help anyone.
Q:Are you interested in Japanese culture?
A: Yes. I think they have a much more honest and stylish minimalism than in the west--and the new maximalism they're working on is sublime.
Q: While Assuming extraterrestrial beings do exist, and suddenly showed up. Do you think they would see the works of Earths Artist both present and past as art? or would there art be so different or advanced that the art here would not "click" in there minds.
A: Extraterrestrials would be unable to tell art from the rest of our stuff. Or if they could tell the difference they wouldn't care. The same way we'll put any old
thing in a museum(wheel barrow, shopping list) as long as it's from ancient Assyria--which is how it should be. If they're really smart they'll leave the explanatory text off the wall too.
Q: Also side question with the advances in our own technology where do you see art going in the future?
A: In the future, art will fill the available places people go to see art. It's one reason paintings still work--people click on a webpage and, hey look, a whole
picture! Easy. Like it or don't. A video means you have to click a button and hope its not a waste of time. Big commitment. It has to start being good
pretty quick.
Some people think art will get high tech very quick. This will only happen if showing it gets cheaper--until that happens we'll keep having
the situation we have now where most of the highest tech art is just sort of redundant versions of things advertising is already doing made by rich kids
and ivory tower grant junkies.
Q: Do you ever get so overwhelmed by an art idea and its potential that you can't bring yourself to make/paint it?
A: No. I just do and do it wrong. Then I do it again.
Q: Do you ever look at your inspiration at a given time as a phase or, to get more swanky, 'period' while you're in the midst of doing it? I feel like that question is not clear so I'm gonna exemplify. Sometimes when I'm depressed I write really angry, painful music/poetry, and while I'm doing it I consciously say to myself 'You're pouring your pent up emotions on the page, that's where this is coming from." Do you pay attention to things like that? Actually do you even define your pieces on the context of the inspiration that lead to them? And do you think where an idea 'comes from' even matters?
A: When I'm working I sometimes get an idea that I'm doing this or that, but the thing tends to come out completely different and about something else. Everything I do ends up having this
same itchy, hyperactive, bouncing-off-the-walls kind of thing which tends to override whatever I thought I was up to at the time.
For better or worse, if you're doing it all the way you tend to metabolize everything into just more you.
Q: Do you guys plan on continuing road of knives?
A: The larger question there is 'Do you guys plan?' And the answer to that is 'No'.
Q: Firstly, what do you think makes art art?
A: The same thing that makes a paperweight a paperweight--someone takes an object and decides to start marketing it to an audience that buys paperweights.
I think a more interesting question is why someone would do that--why would someone market an object as art? Usually because they wanted to make it
and couldn't think of any other way to make enough money off it to afford to make more. Art is sort of the category you put a thing in if it's probably
useless for any other purpose. Art is the commercial category of last resort. If you consistently made sculptures that could double as a luxury bathtubs you would
sell them as luxury bathtubs. Art is like saying 'I don't know what is going to be up with this thing when I'm done, so I'm just going to call it art now so nobody
has any expectations.'
Q: Have you ever looked back at any of your work and found in retrospect that any of it violates or at least sits uncomfortably with your own definition of what art is?
A: I've made some things I--looking back--didn't like, which is way worse. Not making art--everybody does that. Making bad art? I just made the world uglier.
More karma to work off.
Q: What is porn?
A: It's a lot like a paperweight.
Q: Art has always explored territory that science was too immature to even look toward, how do you think your art is leading science and what direction
would you like to guide society with your art?
A: Toward pleasure and away from babies, money, and god.
Q: Do you ever do commissioned work?
A: No.
Q: Or have you ever done so in the past?
A: When I was a kid I made money doing tattoo flash and truck decals and other trashy drawing chores.
Q: Do you think art work about the human body and sexual experience will ever become banal like most landscapes?
A: I don't think the banality of landscapes is unique to our era. I think they were--for the most part--always dull to anyone with an imagination. I mean, giant grey
slab art is popular today among neurotic cowards--I think most landscape painters were the Sol LeWitts of their era. There will always be
people who are terrified of life and need more empty space and these people have always been more susceptible to fashion than people with
brains and nervous systems and better things to do than sit in a corner muttering Tibetan serenity prayers to themselves.
As for art about sex--subject matter is like ingredients. Some recipes need pickles and some don't.
Q: If you could collaborate on a project with 3 people from any time in history, whom would you ask?
A: I think most of the best artists in history are alive today. Road of Knives is about as collaboratey as I'd like to get with other artists. As for
writers I'm already talking to a few and don't want to jinx it.
Q: This one might be dumb, but assume reality is created by consciousness, then what do we make of evolution and history? is the individual mind powerful enough to have constructed eons of information, or, at least, the memory of it, as well as strong enough to impose rules, both artificial (like a legal system) and natural (like the theories built on scientific method of objectively observable data)? can it then break natural law somehow? how would that be done?
A: Please stop watching The Matrix and go outside. Or, barring that, at least read Viriconium for a more interesting take on neognosticism.
Q: What is your biggest grievance/conflict about being a gallery represented artist?
A: Being a gallery-represented artist is way better than most peoples' jobs and nothing to complain about. The art world at large can be a bit of a drag
if you expect it to be intellectually vibrant, but if you expect it to be about as good as the office Christmas party and if you have something else going
on that starts around 11pm you'll be ok.
Q: Is there an avant garde anymore?
A: If you mean artists making good new work that should influence how the world will look, then yes. If you mean, Do they all know each other
and are they all employed as fine artists? No. I'd say about 10% of the avant garde are employed in the fine arts--most have fled to film, animation,
illustration, design, architecture and elsewhere after a sort of anticreativity pogrom that's been going on in the fine arts since the modern gallery
system emerged and realized it was only equipped to sell one or two styles at any given time.
Q: In terms of your career, what was a major step for you in making it into the higher echelon galleries, and selling your work?
A: It was a three-step process:
Step one: filling out the federal loan forms so I could go to Yale.
Step two: not dying while there. (It was easy, New Haven is not a tough town.)
Step three: one of the teachers who wasn't trying to kick me out liked me.
Q: Did it change anything about your practice?
A: No. Most people have a pretty good practice in school and get a lot done, then they get out of school and it does change their
practice because they have to work for a living. The luxury of having a gallery is you get to act like you're in school again.
Q: Do rich folks deserve all the good paintings?
A: Short answer-No.
Long answer-
2002: The 1st painting I ever had in a gallery. They said: How much? I said 6000$. They said: That's crazy. I said: That's minimum wage.
And that was federal minimum wage--not even the minimum wage for the state I was in. And the gallery takes half of that--and then taxes.
In Europe, they're willing to pay artists to make stuff--like in Sweden they will pay you a stipend if you just say you're in a band. But over here? The budget for
military music is bigger than the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. That means America would rather pay a marine to play John Phillip
Sousa on the trombone than see something new.
And, honestly, if the new thing is gonna be more Felix Gonzalez Torres, it's hard to blame them.
I mean, asking people who just got fired from a bank to pay taxes so the NEA can fund more art that looks a lot like a bank does seem kinda cruel.
The solution is clear: stop making bad art and/or smash the state. I'll help out with either.
Q: You're work takes an insane amount of patience. Are you ocd, and if so how else does it effect your life?
A: Im not OCD. In my experience OCD people don't get much done because they're too busy cleaning or interviewing assistants to make their shit for them.
The D in OCD stands for disorder because it dissociates means from ends. Order is only ever a means to an end, and the end is getting shit done. The OCD
person is failing to get shit done.
Professional art interpreters like to spread the idea that artists are crazy so that no-one will listen carefully to what artists say and the ainterpreters can maintain
job security. In reality, if you like my work, then you know why I make it: I want to see it, just like you. The only difference is you're luckier--someone's
already making the thing you want to see for you so you don't have to make it yourself.
Q: Is it significant that the planet earth is in a 'dead' part (non-star
producing) of a mostly dead (non-new-star producing) galaxy? And what
will happen to all of that art when the oceans boil and the mountains
melt? And should I be worrying about this?
A: Short answers: No. It will cease to be. No.
Long answer: Worrying about what the world--art- or otherwise- will be like after you're
dead rather than what you are going to look at while you're alive is probably responsible
for more bad art than THC, ancient Egypt and the Eastern Orthodox Church put together.
Q: Because of new discoveries in science, the end of space is expanding. Do you think it causes the growth of yourself or the growth of your outer frame? And the reason?
A: I really hope there's a language barrier issue here.
Q: While you are driving a car, you see a kitten ahead in your lane. She was hit by another car and her body is flat, but the head part is totally normal and crying at you. Which do you think is the right thing to do? Run over her head to finish her pain, or try to avoid her with believing a miracle?
This was what happened to me really, and I still cannot forget that.
A: Save the kitten. You never know.
It's like the search for extraterrestrial life: the chances of success are remote, but if you end up with a mostly flat cat but with a normal kitten head it'd be so worth it.
Q: Given that no one can say for sure what happens after we die, but
given that the better someone's imagination is the more complex a
picture they may be able to build of such a situation, what happens
after we die? (IE, give us some story about the underworld.)
A: Artists know what happens after you die: your prices go up and people you never met in glasses
pretend to know about you so they can get interviewed on public television.
Q: What's the best way to keep your brain-hand connection from rotting
when you just don't feel like drawing anything?
A; I generally go for my scissors. Not much comes of it, usually, but it's good to keep busy.
Cameras are pretty easy to come by these days, too.
Q: If stars talked to each other using some sort of interstellar email,
what would their words look like?
A: I am on fire and life is spawning around me and it is trying to see me but I burn its
eyes.
Q: When, in the far future, the human world is just One or Two
Governments vs. One or Two Mafia Families, plus all those poor plebs,
who will take over whom, and how?
A: Call me nuts but I'd put my money on whichever party manages to use
a threat of violence to maintain a monopoly over the means of
production.
So, pretty much the way it is now.
Q: Do you ever get Paranoia (the Pynchonian variety)? if so, when?
A: Pynchonian paranoia is that variety where you perceive all things as covertly and sinisterly
connected--and no, I don't get it much. I'm too busy worrying about all the things that're
overtly and sinisterly connected. Our last two wars were started in oil country by a
president who was an oil man and a vice president who ran a military logistics
company. Who needs conspiracy theories?
Q: Would you ever consider painting on bioplastic specifically so that
you could have an laugh about the conservation issues of such
paintings?
Poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) is biodegradable without residue.
personally i would love to see the time-lapse video of 100 years or
however long it took for something like that to just evaporate in the
middle of a museum.
A: It's enough work tryna cook the world's finest cheeseburger without worrying
about how it's arranged on the plate.
Q: I always feel i want to paint things i know people won't give a fuck
about. like the illyrians, for instance should i ignore those urges?
are they dead ends? or will the fact that
a handfull of history geeks go 'cool!' mean it's a good idea?
A: It's alarming how often I get questions like this--young artists
asking if they should make some art they want to make despite or because of the approval of various
allegedly interested or disinterested parties.
The only good thing about this job is you get to do whatever you want. If you can worry about
what somebody else want for 14 hours a day and still be happy, get another job--you might get
health care.
Q: At what point does abstraction and/or self-reflection defeat the purpose of artistic expression?
A: Can you clarify? I don't understand.
Q: The idea of expression, that of conveying information or feeling from one person to another, relies on some shared understanding comparable to language; if two people speak two completely different languages they simply cannot express themselves to each other. Similarly, if an artist's work is so abstracted or so completely focused on the internal, they may as well be speaking a language that only they understand. I was wondering what your thoughts were on that threshold of expressive futility, if you think there's a sort of artistic event horizon past which the artist's meaning cannot escape their own internal or abstracted focus and reach the minds of others.
A: That is a question worth answering at length and I will answer it, but I will provisionally say now that it rests entirely on the bizarre premise
that art is primarily an act of communication.
Ok. What I'm doing now is communicating. You are understanding what I'm saying. If I go 'I like shrimp' right now, you will understand how I stand with
regard to shrimp.
That's because English is actually a language. We use it to communicate--in dull and styleless declaratives--because it is really good at communicating. Art
may make things easier to remember, but it is terrible at communicating them to begin with.
You know why mathematicians all over the world have always understood the Pythagorean theorem? It's not a painting, that's why.
Look at the most well-known well-publicized works of art in the world: the very few people who even care what they mean are still fighting with
each other about what they mean to this day. In fact, just about the only way to get a degree in writing about art is to disagree with what everyone up
until you said about it. If you want to communicate, using art is the best way to be misunderstood.
Only a very sick and anhedonic society could decide art is about communication--do you bake cake to communicate? No, you bake it because you want to eat cake.
Now this idea has been confused because in advertising and journalism they use images to draw attention to ideas, which they then use words to
clarify. (Often in the form of captions.) This should confuse you no more than when a guy trying to sell you a car gives you a cookie shaped like
a car so you'll pay attention to him while he talks.
Another confusion is caused by the fact that, in order to explain how art or a cookie is made or why it tastes good or holds together, you may have
to get into some psychology or chemistry. But all the science in the world won't make it taste better. It can only explain what's already happening.
Many images speak a thousand words--Statue of Liberty--that's only because we have already heard the words and have been told to associate them
with that symbol when they see it.
Now if you really want to, you can use art to explain stuff--like they do with plumbing diagrams. You can also use a piece of dark chocolate to kill a dog
but, again, it doesn't really affect whether the chocolate's tasty or not.
So, yeah, fuck communication, make the cookie you wanna eat.
Q: Do you believe your art is more, or less sexual than Klimt's?
A: Well Klimt's pictures have all these parallel hairy paintstrokes which I think are about as sexual
as a beige wool bathrobe. But that's just me.
Q:In terms of emotion, what inspires your work? ( I know thats cheesy)
A: I think the more of your emotions you can transmute into work, the more work you get done. I get a lot done because I can run on almost
anything. I know artists who can only run on comfort or isolation. They don't get much done. Especially in this economy.
I need something relatively flat and something I can hold that makes marks on it. That's about it.
Q:At any given point, when is art not alive?
A:Please stop being a hippie. It won't help anyone.
Q:Are you interested in Japanese culture?
A: Yes. I think they have a much more honest and stylish minimalism than in the west--and the new maximalism they're working on is sublime.
Q: While Assuming extraterrestrial beings do exist, and suddenly showed up. Do you think they would see the works of Earths Artist both present and past as art? or would there art be so different or advanced that the art here would not "click" in there minds.
A: Extraterrestrials would be unable to tell art from the rest of our stuff. Or if they could tell the difference they wouldn't care. The same way we'll put any old
thing in a museum(wheel barrow, shopping list) as long as it's from ancient Assyria--which is how it should be. If they're really smart they'll leave the explanatory text off the wall too.
Q: Also side question with the advances in our own technology where do you see art going in the future?
A: In the future, art will fill the available places people go to see art. It's one reason paintings still work--people click on a webpage and, hey look, a whole
picture! Easy. Like it or don't. A video means you have to click a button and hope its not a waste of time. Big commitment. It has to start being good
pretty quick.
Some people think art will get high tech very quick. This will only happen if showing it gets cheaper--until that happens we'll keep having
the situation we have now where most of the highest tech art is just sort of redundant versions of things advertising is already doing made by rich kids
and ivory tower grant junkies.
Q: Do you ever get so overwhelmed by an art idea and its potential that you can't bring yourself to make/paint it?
A: No. I just do and do it wrong. Then I do it again.
Q: Do you ever look at your inspiration at a given time as a phase or, to get more swanky, 'period' while you're in the midst of doing it? I feel like that question is not clear so I'm gonna exemplify. Sometimes when I'm depressed I write really angry, painful music/poetry, and while I'm doing it I consciously say to myself 'You're pouring your pent up emotions on the page, that's where this is coming from." Do you pay attention to things like that? Actually do you even define your pieces on the context of the inspiration that lead to them? And do you think where an idea 'comes from' even matters?
A: When I'm working I sometimes get an idea that I'm doing this or that, but the thing tends to come out completely different and about something else. Everything I do ends up having this
same itchy, hyperactive, bouncing-off-the-walls kind of thing which tends to override whatever I thought I was up to at the time.
For better or worse, if you're doing it all the way you tend to metabolize everything into just more you.
Q: Do you guys plan on continuing road of knives?
A: The larger question there is 'Do you guys plan?' And the answer to that is 'No'.
Q: Firstly, what do you think makes art art?
A: The same thing that makes a paperweight a paperweight--someone takes an object and decides to start marketing it to an audience that buys paperweights.
I think a more interesting question is why someone would do that--why would someone market an object as art? Usually because they wanted to make it
and couldn't think of any other way to make enough money off it to afford to make more. Art is sort of the category you put a thing in if it's probably
useless for any other purpose. Art is the commercial category of last resort. If you consistently made sculptures that could double as a luxury bathtubs you would
sell them as luxury bathtubs. Art is like saying 'I don't know what is going to be up with this thing when I'm done, so I'm just going to call it art now so nobody
has any expectations.'
Q: Have you ever looked back at any of your work and found in retrospect that any of it violates or at least sits uncomfortably with your own definition of what art is?
A: I've made some things I--looking back--didn't like, which is way worse. Not making art--everybody does that. Making bad art? I just made the world uglier.
More karma to work off.
Q: What is porn?
A: It's a lot like a paperweight.
Q: Art has always explored territory that science was too immature to even look toward, how do you think your art is leading science and what direction
would you like to guide society with your art?
A: Toward pleasure and away from babies, money, and god.
Q: Do you ever do commissioned work?
A: No.
Q: Or have you ever done so in the past?
A: When I was a kid I made money doing tattoo flash and truck decals and other trashy drawing chores.
Q: Do you think art work about the human body and sexual experience will ever become banal like most landscapes?
A: I don't think the banality of landscapes is unique to our era. I think they were--for the most part--always dull to anyone with an imagination. I mean, giant grey
slab art is popular today among neurotic cowards--I think most landscape painters were the Sol LeWitts of their era. There will always be
people who are terrified of life and need more empty space and these people have always been more susceptible to fashion than people with
brains and nervous systems and better things to do than sit in a corner muttering Tibetan serenity prayers to themselves.
As for art about sex--subject matter is like ingredients. Some recipes need pickles and some don't.
Q: If you could collaborate on a project with 3 people from any time in history, whom would you ask?
A: I think most of the best artists in history are alive today. Road of Knives is about as collaboratey as I'd like to get with other artists. As for
writers I'm already talking to a few and don't want to jinx it.
Q: This one might be dumb, but assume reality is created by consciousness, then what do we make of evolution and history? is the individual mind powerful enough to have constructed eons of information, or, at least, the memory of it, as well as strong enough to impose rules, both artificial (like a legal system) and natural (like the theories built on scientific method of objectively observable data)? can it then break natural law somehow? how would that be done?
A: Please stop watching The Matrix and go outside. Or, barring that, at least read Viriconium for a more interesting take on neognosticism.
Q: What is your biggest grievance/conflict about being a gallery represented artist?
A: Being a gallery-represented artist is way better than most peoples' jobs and nothing to complain about. The art world at large can be a bit of a drag
if you expect it to be intellectually vibrant, but if you expect it to be about as good as the office Christmas party and if you have something else going
on that starts around 11pm you'll be ok.
December 14, 2011
(andy san dimas)(in progress)(acrylic on paper)
(andy san dimas)(in progress)(acrylic on paper)
December 9, 2011
November 26, 2011
detail acrylic on paper in progress
detail acrylic on paper in progress
lorraine 30 x 40 acrylic on paper
lorraine 30 x 40 acrylic on paper
October 14, 2011
4:29 AM.Did a visiting artist thing at a university today...
4:29 AM.
Did a visiting artist thing at a university today, everyone was very nice and kept asking me
to sign things. I'm always surprised how these auditoriums are full. And the kids are doing good work. Lots of questions, but no angry antisexuals (Are they all dead? Or do they just know enough to stay away by now?)
Came back to the hotel and plugged into the wi-fi, noticed Matt Kish's Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated-inspired book is going over well, and China Mieville is talking about me, too.
It is really easy to forget, in the little room at the little desk with one window--watching Mandy run through Mass Effect 2 for the 8th time because she's too sick to do anything else and showing her sister how to use a can opener--or in living in LA where everyone's got other things on their mind--that there's a world out there with people in it and they are actually noticing the things you do.
Anyway, when will I be back at home, near my scanner and be able put up some pictures? Don't know. January if not earlier.
Keep in touch.
Did a visiting artist thing at a university today, everyone was very nice and kept asking me
to sign things. I'm always surprised how these auditoriums are full. And the kids are doing good work. Lots of questions, but no angry antisexuals (Are they all dead? Or do they just know enough to stay away by now?)
Came back to the hotel and plugged into the wi-fi, noticed Matt Kish's Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated-inspired book is going over well, and China Mieville is talking about me, too.
It is really easy to forget, in the little room at the little desk with one window--watching Mandy run through Mass Effect 2 for the 8th time because she's too sick to do anything else and showing her sister how to use a can opener--or in living in LA where everyone's got other things on their mind--that there's a world out there with people in it and they are actually noticing the things you do.
Anyway, when will I be back at home, near my scanner and be able put up some pictures? Don't know. January if not earlier.
Keep in touch.
October 11, 2011
Near Dekalb Illinois?"Zak Smith will give an artist lectu...
Near Dekalb Illinois?
"
Zak Smith will give an artist lecture from 6-8 p.m. Oct. 13 in Room 100
of the Visual Arts Building (Jack Arends Hall) on the Northern Illinois
University campus in DeKalb. A reception will follow in the main
gallery."
"
"
Zak Smith will give an artist lecture from 6-8 p.m. Oct. 13 in Room 100
of the Visual Arts Building (Jack Arends Hall) on the Northern Illinois
University campus in DeKalb. A reception will follow in the main
gallery."
"
September 22, 2011
sorry, I'm not near my scanner and haven't been for la fe...
sorry, I'm not near my scanner and haven't been for la few months.
I am sitting here painting stuff right now, though.
I am sitting here painting stuff right now, though.
