(Image via Threadless.)

No, it’s not a pipe, and you can buy one here.

(Image via Threadless.)

Quick post on a brainstorm while driving.

My sketchbook ends up as a repository for ideas. For example, it was so nice and cozy to get into my warm car. The bucket seat was warm, the air was warm. I’d like to make that experience. (Even if the viewer is reduced to viewing, it’s still about the experience of viewing, and whatever that sends the viewer thinking about, at least for me.)

This is a problem. Ideas get recorded, and never see the light of day again. If I’m making something, sometimes I lose track of the driving force behind it, and rediscover later. Not good. (Though it’s not too hard to keep those things out front: design intent. Write it and tack it to the wall.)

With ideas that are only the seed of something, it’s hard not to find them replaced by the next shiny thing. If I were to mine my sketchbook right now, I’d find some things to go back to, some situations to construct. They might develop along the way – the process of getting the mental picture and the verbal description to become form has a tendency to do that.

So I wonder how I might keep these ideas out front, without them becoming a part of my visual landscape that isn’t so actively present.

Since I’ve been working on this piece for months, it’s about time to post something about it. Here are a few photos from the installation at the Link Gallery at UIUC. Unlike the previous installations in the raw space where I had 2-d works serving in an architectural capacity, here I pulled the functions apart, to let the 2d drawing/painting/sculpture works stand better on their own. I enjoy the stillness of the piece. It’s not working as well as it could, not yet. The space is far from ideal; in this iteration it becomes a visual event that’s compartmentalized in a much larger place, which is bad for it. Enclosing it would have worked poorly in this gallery. That’s okay, I’m learning, and it’s still pretty solid.

Here’s a shot from crit night. The sheer quantity of stuff-in-the-air is kind of amazing.

I like things. Things are, nice, finite.

I particularly like things that aren’t about the thing at all. Where the existence of the thing might even be considered a form of misdirection. I particularly like things that point to the mind of the maker, that allow me to enjoy the creativity of the person who did it.

Two strategies that come to mind are to make not-things and to make unquestionable things. There are lots of kinds of not-things. Maybe, like matter and anti-matter, more kinds of not-things than there are things. I suppose one could start by defining things, and work from there. There are lots of in-between places and lots of definitions to be considered.

Definition can be another form of misdirection. What’s not important is how the thing (or not-thing) is classified, what’s important is what it is. Maybe what it is, is as important as what is not.

But I like to look at matters in the most abstract way possible.

This semester I have done lots of making. There are a lot of makings. Many of the moments of making crept by, undocumented if not unnoticed. What’s the point of enjoying an experience if one is forever stepping outside the experience to document its happening? Better to just let it go by.

Just discovered:
http://butdoesitfloat.com/
Art, art, and art. Lots. Stuff. Often. Look.

Also the Fred Sandback Archive has texts of interviews with him, things like that. Pretty cool.