I made a decision about two years ago that any art I made would be personal. Perhaps all art is, but I intended that all of mine should be self-consciously so, that it should deal with my experiences and reflect my tastes, and not try to overstep its reach--no opus on the horror of the Bosnian conflict was in my future; if it wasn't in my life, I would not try to comment on it.
      I considered it dishonest (and almost always boring) for someone to attempt to speak with a voice that wasn't genuinely their own, to adopt issues for themselves that had nothing to do with their own base of experience. An actual relationship could be formed then to the melodramatic opening line of my earlier statement--with my art consciously taking its start from my own life, my work would necessarily document my life's substance in some way, highlighting my attachments and affectations. Another way of approaching this is to say that, if nothing else, my work has been motivated by self-absorption and the desire to entertain myself. After all, the answer as to why an artist does what he does, and what the audience gets out of it, do not have to be the same.

      In other words, this grounding in the personal was for my own personal reasons as well as methodology. Autobiography was not intended to be the sole content for an audience. I therefore chose to document personal things indirectly and facetiously, to play with how much of myself I invested in a work. This has been done frequently through common objects given as placeholders of meaning, as artifacts, evidence. An example work, Souvenir (1999), tells the history of a failed relationship simply through the literal and figurative surface of love letters and cards--the sentences that are legible repeat phrases of misunderstandings and apologies without narrating the incidents. Postmarks and dated letters describe a period of time over which these documents act as punctuation marks for now unspoken sentences. After the end, those relics are all that remain as evidence. The subjects for Cherry Coke (1999) and No-Brand Vanilla Ice Cream (1999) were selected simply through my own buying habits. The manner of presentation suggests importance should be placed upon these mass-produced items, and a personal relationship is affirmed with the impersonal. Our day to day lives are largely constructed through the slow accumulation of banality, whether it's mass consumer products or family snapshots. Should we make what has been impersonal and common intimate and special, or if these objects aren't worth such consideration, then should we eject such things from our lives? Should we highlight the choices that we have made among the mundane choices that are available to us in our culture?

      The deadpan humor of these "pop" works of mine can't be denied, and my seriousness in proclaiming the importance of Cherry Coke to myself can't avoid being questioned. In any work of mine, I can not avoid being ambiguous about my degree of personal investment. If I can stand apart from it in some way, then I can look on it with some self-mocking. The only way to honestly deal with life in an honest yet productive way is through humor. Without this, you're missing the reality of the hollow structures and purposes that we construct for ourselves and that we even are. On the other hand, if you lose all reverence, you inevitably lose all passion and interest in life. Being a rationalist, a philosophic materialist and other such weighty things, I don't believe in ultimate purpose, God, literal divinity, or in the total sanctity of anything. I think that the best that people are capable of in any case are half-measures and approximate truths. The only way to cope, the only way to carry on while accepting this, is with a touch of ironic humor, a smirk as we go about wasting time and exploring our various conceits.

      This tendency of trying to play in that middle ground between loss and preservation, between commitment and distance--I suppose this has been an evasion on my part, to keep from being pinned down too firmly to a solid meaning. Once a true investment has been located, it can be judged, and judged as having failed. Aesthetic interest could always be a safety net--if I wasn't going to rely on the communication of an idea, then at least I'd present something interesting to look at, something that looked perhaps as if it did have meaning. There are times when I can recognize that everything has beauty, that everything can be appreciated in an aesthetic manner. This reduction of everything into visual sensation makes everything digestible, and keeps it at a distance--you no longer have to confront its meaning in relation to you. My Dictionary Selection series was a treatment of dictionary text as pure visual, as just another image to "depict," and then crop according to compositional rather than semantic needs.

      The reason that I chose a dictionary to treat in this way was because I was drawn to what I only identified as an anachronistic feeling from it. This is more true for dictionaries that use more traditional, seriphed fonts, but it's really the format that appealed to me. I think of it now as a throwback to an earlier period in our culture, a time of supreme confidence in our ability to describe all of nature in very exact terms, including human endeavors. Academic works took such an air of authority upon themselves, because the authors believed themselves to be cataloging final truths. Dictionaries present themselves as unequivocal final words on words, despite the fact that new editions are always being printed to incorporate an always changing language.

      In general, when I first started to allow text into images of mine, it was because of how I thought it looked and felt when it couldn't be read, but was still identifiable as text. The mere recognition of the forms of language suggested that there was meaning, but what that meaning was remained unknowable as long as the text was unreadable. When I started working in collage, in both painting and digital forms, the text was just another equivalent element to incorporate into the picture. Collage brings together different fragments into a new and forced context. A collage may or may not preserve some sense of the original meaning those fragments might have had, but a collage always implicates its parts in a new meaning even if none is intended. None of my earliest visual collages, including Decay (1999), had what I would have then consciously identified as a "meaning," but I felt that the impression of one at least resolved itself from the right combination of visual elements, like a rebus, only one in which I had no real solution. In the series of images These Are Scans, There Are Layers, and Decorative Lines (1999), I set out to consciously mock this notion--pointing hands suggest hidden meaning, while the title blandly states what the image is literally composed of.

      collection (1999) was a conceptual step in the reverse direction, a work aimed not at implying meaning, but at reducing it. Physical forms ranging from trash to books to human body parts are reduced first to a photographic surrogate, and then all are displayed in a grid with the label of "object." The display method of pinning them all to a board with T-pins, used in the collecting of biological specimens, furthered this idea of a collection, of a common ground found only after the imposition of a uniform format, at the loss of each object's individual nature and meaning. I use the term equalization for this kind of categorical, classificatory reduction. This was the first work that identified these issues for me consciously, but it was awhile before I thought that perhaps more of what I had been doing could be looked at in the same way, as if through always mocking, through facetiously suggesting or avoiding meanings, my works ended up being about meaning in some way I could build off of.

      A collage isn't unique in being able to imply meaning. What really interests me about collage is what makes them identifiable in the first place. Every creation of a collage destroys information--the new meaning of the forced context overwrites the old--but if that were a complete process, then we would simply consider the final result an integrated image, not a composite even when finished. A collage is only identifiable when there is a still present tension between the individual fragments and the integrated composition each insisting upon their respective levels of reality. This is the same sort of tension I found interesting in other acts of equalization such as the dictionary format.

      Thinking back, I've always sought to play with arrangements for things, some way to compare and get everything on the same plane and then deal with them. When I was a young comic book reader and worked daily at creating my own comic book universe, I never actually drew a single page of sequential art. Instead I obsessively created entry after entry after entry in my own fictional encyclopedia, setting all the key players up in relationship to one another, and I felt as if I couldn't proceed with the actual drawing until those relationships were laid out. I never did finish, and so the mere enumeration of the characters and their histories superseded the actual telling.
      When I was a bit older and took illustration more seriously, I believed that my loyal representations would be my legacy, that pieces of the world seen through my eyes and recreated with my hands would be the way in which I would live on. I remember having drives to treat just about every subject matter in this way, to draw a picture of everything that I could, for no other reason than to have my vision of it recorded in mass. Each subject that I drew was something else that I could add to the category of having been drawn or portrayed by me, and therefore formed a collection of sorts. There is an ownership implicit in this, something that John Berger in Ways of Seeing judges integral to the history of oil painting in Europe: "To have a thing painted and put on a canvas is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house." And again, that oil painting "reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity."
       Most recently I have been pondering an idea that is in a sense the opposite of equalization, the fact that we attribute entirely different meanings to objects that are physically identical in every observable way. This selection among indistinguishable things puzzled me for a long time, though I understood it had something to do with context, but now I see it naturally relating to the topics that I had already been exploring. Many artworks can not be even identified by their aesthetic qualities at all, but instead as part of a narrative described in terms of their relationship to us in the context of presentation and in the particular historical path that brought the artist to make that work. That presentation context of the art world doesn't define the work, but instead singles it out as a work and not just a thing, just as the imposed contexts that I was fascinated with serve to destroy that kind of interpretive information even with things not entirely similar.

      The knife that I used to butter my toast (and three others I didn't) (2001) is my first direct response to this idea. The significance of an object at the center of an admittedly mundane narrative is known only through the display's title, and the handwritten inscription. The ability to rightfully place this meaning on a single object is lost, the information of which knife it was has been destroyed through the non-differentiated display of the four knives. Meaning is simultaneously created and destroyed.

      This format of the collection, the presented document, is one that I'm sure I will be returning to in the future, because it deals so well with these issues of relationships of meaning and context. I have never wanted to limit myself in what I've done, however, and so I will also continue to work in every other medium that I have started to explore; whichever suits an idea that I have the best. Every tool brings different possibilities and qualities to a work. Video is one in which there is immense potential for my purposes, because it is essentially a collage spread over time--relationships are automatically established simply through a succession of shots and the association of video to audio. The shots in 33 rpm (2000, reedited 2001), by themselves, innocently captured anything that could happen during a day in my life, but when shown in relationship with a voice-over describing a dream that I actually had, a dark narrative emerges.
      Computers are a wonderful tool for collage, for compositing. With the World Wide Web, a found image archive that would have taken years to slowly amass from print media can be assembled in minutes, following both my own as well as serendipitous associations. There is a liberation from the necessities of time, of slow accretion of process--elements are added and taken away with the click of a mouse, and without any residue. Because it is so easy to make changes or correct mistakes, or to undo our corrections, I think that our decision making speeds up with a computer. Our thinking changes in response to the tools that we use. Rendering, blending, blurring, compositing; all of this happens within seconds, while with painting, it could have taken days, or weeks, waiting for each oil glaze to dry. That is the other liberation, from the limitations of physicality. Everything is projected onto the common ground of information, which has endless permutations, and endless mutability. This nature of computers is above all else what enticed me into collage.

       It's difficult for me to pin down my influences because I haven't kept good records of what I encountered at what time, but there are definitely some examples that stand out as either having been important to me, or important to me now. These are listed below in almost a format of thank you's, separate from the previous narrative of my conceptual development which they would inevitably interrupt, thus threatening the simplistic reduction.

      I studied Jasper Johns for awhile, and it was probably his work that led me to start including text in mine. His use of iconic images such as the flag and the U.S. map was certainly influential--until his work, every copying of these symbols would constitute a use, but with his work, they became subjects to represent.

      Robert Rauschenberg is also an artist I admire a great deal. For awhile, his early black paintings were favorites of mine, because of the way in which they seemed to speak of a history, a process of wear rather than of creation to get the way that they were--I was thinking of this when I made the surfaces on many of my paintings.
       He dealt with what I term equalization as a symptom of contemporary culture, as images and words are juxtaposed next to one another in a coincidental manner and without emphasis--all have equal weight. Though there are certainly many throughout his career, his 1955 painting Rebus is a good example of a direct statement on this--a long sequence of combined images "include active figures derived from sources that might be encountered casually in an urban environment...color and image jostle each other without dominance as they might for a person walking down the street."
      A museum director said, in speaking of his combines, that "Bob Rauschenberg painted himself into the picture...the difference is that 'himself' is what he happened to have around him, at the moment." Through his inclusion of everyday objects and media imagery, Rauschenberg certainly helped create the cultural space of Pop Art, though I wouldn't try to force him entirely into that label. Pop Art was not as much of a revolution in art as some may think; it used commercial content because that was the content of the culture, and increasingly of peoples' lives. You are what you consume. This reference to the self through objects supposedly lacking a self is certainly something I've played with. However, the implicit statement of pop art that I have taken to heart most in my own work is that nothing is sacred and nothing is worthless, and everything is equally plunderable.

      Allen Ginsberg wrote that "Art lies in the consciousness of doing the thing...in the sacramentalization of everyday reality." The vision of the Beat writers was to transfigure their everyday lives in poor, postwar America. Jack Kerouac's writings in particular helped open my eyes to the fact that everything can provide an aesthetic experience worth pondering and remembering, even the most common or rundown. My animation Noli Me Tangere (2000) was made partially with those thoughts in mind, focusing on the simple act of flicking a cigarette on to a highway at night. Though Kerouac's direct autobiographical approach isn't my style, his insistence that there shouldn't be anything in your life that you can't make art of is something that I try to take to heart.

      Many of the decisions that I made in constructing images were impulsive ones that I didn't understand, but recognized as the right decisions by some kind of unconscious or purely emotional calculation. This would apply to much of the content in my digital collages, primarily the earlier ones (which were made first through some prolonged web surfing, and then trial-and-error mix-and-match), but also the later faux Christian saint icons. My faith in this process to produce an interesting result was most likely due to my reading of Surrealism. I had appreciated Dali for years, and have always been interested in fantasy, in the absurd or irrational. As I understand it, the process of the Surrealists in making their art was to attempt to submerge conscious decision making as much as possible, to avoid contrivance and trust that more submerged ideas and meanings would emerge. It may not be the strongest conceptual base to work from, but I enjoy sometimes being more on the side of the viewer's struggle to interpret an image in relationship to my own work.

      I think that John Baldessari is a lot of fun. He's probably the first conceptual artist that I learned to appreciate, and it was definitely the ironic humor that drew me in. Something that I've thought about a great deal is his idea that much of the activity of art involves pointing, not only to tell us what to look at, but to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. In a segment from the video How We Do Art Now, entitled Examining Three 8d Nails, obsessive attention is given to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others. This could be read as a scathing critique of formalism. However, whether or not there might also have been a constructive intention, I would still claim there is an importance of drawing distinguishments even among ostensibly identical objects. The use of hand icons in some of my digital composites to pretend that there was something important being pointed at was appropriated from his work, and I really don't think I could have done collection or The knife that I used... without being aware of him (or someone else who did work exactly like his).

postdlf
2001

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