Just a quick link, not a full artist report. Happened to come across Oliver Barratt. Some of his work I really connect with (some I don’t). The line pieces are beautiful and sexy. The pieces on breath have a solid existence of their own – in a very different way. The way he titles work is also sometimes really good – evocative but not heavy handed. (I’ve been thinking about that sense of the function of a title, lately.)

In a purely material-and-process sense, some of his work provides strategies that make me go, oh! …the sound of brain cells colliding. No signs of the apocalypse yet, though.

Anyway, here’s a link to Barratt’s sculpture page. He’s done some public works and some drawings that you can find in other parts of the website.

Earlier this week I read a volume of short stories by Miranda July, entitled No One Belongs Here More Than You.

It was a lot like The Future (which I wrote about here). By this I mean: it was honest in a hard way, and it was absurd and sad, which also made it funny in a dark way, and endearing, albeit in a pathetic sort of way. Maybe it’s the familiarity, sort of like a kid will still love a stuffed animal so well-worn as to be falling apart. Whatever this is, it denies rationale. From NOBHMTY:

Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming of something else.

The nice thing about books and movies is the duration aspect: you can get all sorts of different kinds of moments, and it all comes together as a lovely whole. It’s easier to say something by bringing parts together.

The prose flows but sometimes it doesn’t make any sense – or, it makes sense in the way that dreams make sense. For me, it was an enjoyable read. Other people might just say it’s an odd one. Leave your expectations on the bedside table. From NOBHMTY:

Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

Finished Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm last night. (Amazon link) The prose gets looser at times than in the trio that I read in the summer and early into this fall semester (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in a volume with An American Childhood and The Writing Life – together, one of my desert island picks).

The prose gets loose, so the experience of reading becomes more about the experience of reading, the general flow of the thing, less about individual bits.

People released from burn wards, I read once, have a very high suicide rate. They had not realized, before they were burned, that life could include such suffering, nor that they personally could be permitted such pain. No drugs ease the pain of third-degree burns, because burns destroy skin: the drugs simply leak into the sheets.

(The book was written in the late seventies; in the last thirty years we’ve maybe done a little better with burn treatment.)

The book is about life: cruel, absurd, cold, senseless. Observes death, and muses. Reflects, angrily, on helplessness, on what uncaring God – do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims? The book is about life: strange and occasionally beautiful.

I’ve mentioned Martin Creed at leastonce before. If you want to know why I like him, start there. A couple more online bits offered herein, and a bit of thought on my own practice:

An interview with him on The Guardian. The photo above is from there, too.

A quote from the interview: “Art is just things in the world, usually an arrangement of colour and shapes. It’s people who have the feelings and the reactions.”

The Tate does a series of artist interviews; here’s the Youtube link to the interview with him. It’s about five minutes long and looks at a show he’s doing in Edinburgh.

A quote from near the end:

I think for me the point of repetition is that I find it kinda comforting, something like that. To me like the world is just like a big crazy place; it’s really difficult when, when everything’s going like, aaaaaaa, you know, I have funny feelings and I have to, you know, and it’s all a big mess, so, if i, if i can make something that has some kinda regularity in it that helps me to… it’s like a framework within which all the craziness can take place, you know.

That resonated with me. I mean, I find that repetitive making and habitual making become a sort of grounding thing, a ritual. Finally I stop being in denial and hitting the snooze on the alarm clock, or maybe I’m ready to get up when it goes off. Maybe I have to pee. I take my photo. I brush my teeth, and another day’s addition to the series is set to dry. (Toothpaste spit on paper.) I take my allergy meds. (If I didn’t have to pee the moment I was upright, I do now.) At that, the ritual ends. Will I have breakfast before or after I get dressed? Will I put my contacts in? Am I riding my bike or driving? Do I need a morning snack and lunch and an afternoon snack, and maybe dinner, or will I come home? Which clothes do I have to take for later in the day? If it’s not a school day, what chores and errands have I put off to the point of desperation? Decisions, decisions. But: pee, photo, toothpaste, allergy meds. The rest of my day will be a tangle of exigencies, but at least I can count on that.

I’ve tried to do something, and that is what I’ve done; it’s not, I don’t, I don’t know what it is I’ve done, but it did involve work, you know. [laughs]

By the way, I love reading interviews with artists. They have a tendency to be straight and honest about what a piece is, where it’s come from, what it became.

I have a more strained relationship with essays by art critics and art historians. It’s interesting sometimes to watch them try to make sense of things (the essays in my book on Gabriel Orozco (Amazon link) is a recent example in my reading). Sometimes it comes off as ex post facto justification. The problem with essays is that, when I only want to figure out what some pieces actually are (when photographs aren’t adequate representations), I don’t want to wade through somebody else’s interpretation.

What this points to, though, is that somebody can do compelling and utterly legitimate art, and that sometimes rationalizations become transparent as such.