Fluxus and Slacker Art

I recently learned that Beck's grandfather was Al Hansen.  Hansen was a prominent artist affiliated with the fluxus movement in the 50's and 60's. How's that for a direct genealogical line from the beatnik fluxus artwork, which was often immaterial, based on chance, and performative, to Beck's position as the quintessential slacker of the 90's.  This is starting to make sense.  I see now how slacker art has some roots in the fluxus movement.  Hansen made collages out of cigarette butts, Beck sings about being a loser.  It couldn't be any simpler. 

New Work

A sample of the projects I'm working on.


The Triangle is the Strongest Shape (1,2,3 &4)
18"x18" Acrylic on Canvas

4EVA
12"x12"
Acrylic on Canvas

Piano Hammer
30"x40"
Acrylic and Silk Screen Ink on Canvas



Untitled Installation
work in progress

I like the crowds and the really big shows, people touching people that they really don't know

My iPod is slowly going insane.  This morning on my train commute 30 seconds of a Hold Steady song was interjected into a Nico Muhly song.  This is the 3rd time its happened, however the 1st 2 time were around a year ago and occurred during a song by Our Lady of the Flowers, aka Nicholas Moore.  Nicholas is a friend of mine who started making ambient/drone/noise music when he moved to Colorado.  After some prodding he sent me 5 discs of circuit bent madness.  None of the tracks were named, and at the time I thought he sampled the Hold Steady song, and afterword I couldn't find it.  I thought it was interesting song, 7 or 8 minutes of drone abruptly cutting to Craig Finn shouting "I like the crowds and the really big shows,  People touching people that they really don't know".  The irony kinda made sense.  But this morning it happened again, same Hold Steady sample interjected into a different song. What the hell?  

from The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

But slapped amid these mundane bills, as if it belonged there by right, was a great three-sheet broadside, a thing the size of a horse-blanket, Engine-printed, rumpled in the hasty plastering. Indeed, its very ink seemed still damp.
A mad thing.
Mallory stopped dead before it, stricken by its crude bizarrity. It had been done in three colors - scarlet, black, and an ugly greyish-pink that seemed a muddle of the two.
A scarlet blindfolded woman - a Goddess of Justice?- in a blurry scarlet toga brandished a scarlet sword labeled LUDD over the pinkish-grey heads of two very crudely rendered figures, a man and a woman depicted in busts - a king and a queen? Lord and Lady Byron perhaps? The scarlet goddess trampled the midsection of a large two-headed snake, or scaly dragon, its writhing body labeled MERIT-LORDSHIP. Behind the scarlet women, the skyline of a London was vigorously aflame in scarlet tongues of fire, while the sky all about the various demented figures was full of stylized scrolLs of thick black cloud. Three men, clergymen or savants apparently dangled from a gallows in thE upper-right hand corner, and in the upper-left a confused mass of ill-formed gesticulating figures waved flags and Jacobin pikes, advancing toward some unknown goal under the bearded star of a comet. 

And this was not the half of it. Mallory rubbed at his aching eyes. The vast rectangular sheet seethed with smaller images like a billiard-table littered with random pool-balls. Here a dwarfish wind-god blew out a cloud labeled PESTILENCE. There a cannon-shell, or bomb, exploded in stylized spiky fragments, small black misshapen imps being flung aside by the blast. A coffin heaped with flowers held a noose atop it. A nude woman crouched at the feet of a monster, a well-dressed man with the head of a reptile. A tiny praying man in epaulets stood on a gallows, while the hangman, a little fellow with a hood and his sleeves rolled up, gestured brusquely at the noose . . . More of the smudgy smoke-clouds, flung onto the image like mud, connected the whole business like the dough of a fruit-cake. And there was text, too, near the bottom. A title, in large smudgy Engine-type: "THE SEVEN CURSES OF THE WHORE OF BABYLONDON!!!"

The stones you collected on your trip to the coast never left your pant pockets. They went through the wash, now they are banging and clanging a racket in the dryer. 

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

They have a new species here too: people with antennas coming out of their heads. The antennas look like the ones on cop walkie-talkies: short, blunt, black rubber whips. They rise up from behind the ear. The first time she sees one of these people, she figures it must be some kind of new Walkman, and she wants to ask the guy where he got it, what he's listening to. But he's a strange guy, stranger than all of the others, with a permanent thousand-yard stare and a bad case of the mumbles, and he ends up giving her the creeps so bad that she just shoves an extra-large dose of stew in his face and hurries him on down the line. 

Iowa flooded

My parents live near the flooded areas in SE Iowa.  Recently my mom sent me this email. 

Hwy61, 1, 22, 92, 6, the Burlington , Ft. Madison & Keokuk bridge are all closed.
Oakville doesn't exist anymore. Neither does Gulfport as of last night.
Not sure the status of Davenport. I know the riverfront is flooded but
I don't know about the bridges if they are open or not.
 
They opened Interstate 80 two days ago. It was flooded around Tipton in Cedar county
but 218 is closed around Cedar Rapids. The only way we can get to Muscatine is by
taking 218 to 80 and down 38. It's about 110 miles.
 
Hopefully one of the highways will open by the time you come to Iowa.
 
Columbus Jct can't use or drink their water. Curt and family sandbagged Wed,
Thurs and Friday. Your Dad helped in Oakville on Friday - he said there were
over 2000 people helping. But it didn't work. Dad and I helped a family move
out of their house about three miles south of Kingston on Sat. They were told to
evacuate at 1pm on Sat and had to be out by 10pm. This couple is in their late
70's. Kinda like packing up Grandpa's house - they have lived there over 60 years.
 
I guess there are a dozen or more hog confinements in the Oakville bottoms and
had around 30,000 hogs in them. They could only move out 5000 so they just let
the rest loose - and lost 25.000 hogs. Mary said Doug Lee told her someone got
a picture of some hogs on top of houses and on porches in Oakville. Mary & I went
down to 99 to see what we could which there is only about one mile of the highway
not under water. We talked to some people from PETA and they are putting boats
in today to see if they can rescue any animals. And a guy was shooting a video
of the river and was working on a documentary for PBS. Looked like something you
would do.
 
The river is at a toxic level now because of the chemicals from the farmland & animal
waste. I don't think we will be able to swim in the Mississippi anymore.  
  
 
Have a good day,
love, Mom

Fathers Day Cake Celebration

Fish Tie

I got a fish tie for fathers day,

and my kids baked me a cake.

It was delicious. 

Ingredients:

flour

sugar

salt

coriander

coffee grounds

cheerios

watercolor paint

Photo from Vega Estates Vega Caucus

Pedometer Interview

Amy Rudberg recently interviewed me as part of her ongoing project:

How I’m trying to help my Facebook friends (33): Interview with artist Cole Pierce and his pedometer.


What is a pedometer?
A pedometer is a step counter. It is a device that counts each step a person takes by detecting the motion of their hips.

How does your pedometer work with your cell phone?
After visiting Wikipedia, I learned that my cell phone uses an “embedded 2 axis MEMS inertial sensors to detect the steps a user takes.” My phone displays my steps on the external display. It counts detected steps during the day, and at midnight it stores the counter in a day-by-day history and resets it to zero. My height and weight are used to estimate the length of my stride.

When did you start using a pedometer?
I have been using a pedometer for about 2 or 3 months. My wife activated it for me without telling me. For a few days I wondered what the random numbers on the screen meant. Mostly out of curiosity, I check my step count a few times a day and before I go to sleep. I don't exercise regularly and feel a little guilty about it. If I walk over 5 miles in one day, my conscious is clear. I also feel physically better. And it’s better than sitting on my ass all day long. Walking 5 miles is not very hard; all and all I have my doubts as to whether or not it constitutes worthy physical activity. It seems very little compared to running, biking or swimming regularly. On a different note, I am amused that my phone tediously records something as banal as walking.

What is your daily goal?
My goal is to be better than average, which is currently 8,043 steps (about 4 miles). That is the distance I walk to and from work if I take the train. I question the accuracy of the average, which I guess is low if you factor in the days my battery is dead or if I don't have my phone in my pocket. On several occasions I've walked more than 10 miles, which feels like a real accomplishment.

What do you do to achieve your goal?
Not much. I just walk. I only drive when I need to haul stuff around or if the weather is bad. I don't take extra walks to try to up my step count, but I do try to keep my phone with me when walking. I am more conscious of the fact that my walking is being recorded and archived. I wish there was a web application that displayed this archive and my step count in real time on my blog.


Check out Amy's project here and here is some other stuff Amy is involved in:
http://www.chicagoarts-lifestyle.com
http://www.amyrud.gather.com
http://www.flickr.com/groups/artstylebloggroup
http://www.ehow.com/members/amyrud.html

Old Gold Final Reduction Sale

Outside the Polish Falcoln, Milwaukee WI, May 17th 2008

recontextualized

I had work in two shows over the weekend, both of which were 'heavily curated'. Vega Estates kicked off their summer season of monthly exhibitions with an ambitious group show. Their garage vs basement program will start on June 14th. Last Saturday "The Vega Caucus" promised to recontextualize the included work. The results created a vague narrative, or perhaps developed a fictitious character through installation and curaturial decisions. My ongoing free mixed cd project, which is usually an innocuous stack of cds on the outskirts of my exhibition, was much more public and social. At the curators request my role was more performative. I brought a deck of cards and played 21 with people, and later in the night when I left my post I found the table and cards being used to play war. Via teeny boombox, the mixed CDs provided the backdrop to the rainy opening and Lauren Anderson's dead donkey pinata. Tami Lynn's 20 minute heartbreaking soul ballad played during the violent destruction of the pinata, which turned out to be empty.

Earlier that day, I had a painting in a van sale outside of a bowling alley. Old Gold supplied 23 artists with black canvases and the instructions to make a $100 painting. These paintings were sold out of Old Gold curators Caleb and Kathryn van on the patio of the Polish Falcon for the Milwaukee International Art Fair. They called it the Final Reduction Sale. Mine was the shiny sparkly black one with zillions scrawled while the paint was wet.

mix cds for Vega Caucus

silk screen ink and spray paint on paper envelopes, double cd, edition of 50

untitled collage

drywall tape, acrylic paint on paper 6" x 12"

Limits are Liberating

heavenly screen

autechre show

On recommendation from Tyler I attended an Autechre show at the Abbey Pub last Friday, and true to his words it was a "wall of abstract sound". It was wonderfully perplexing, like dueling schizophrenic robots, or maybe a robot going insane. Layers of pulsating mechanical rhythms shifting and alternating, like machines trying to become human. Battlestar Galactica fans know what I'm talking about. In accordance with concert protocol, Autechre came on after (dj) Rob Hall and Massonix. Rob Hall was fabulous, rocking the scatterbrain idm we all know and love. Massonix, despite his elder status in the electronic music world, was bland and boring. The first two acts tenderized the crowd with deafening idm, which varies in form but maintaings semblance to the beats and rhythms of rave, house, hip hop, dub and blues. This is groove based music that inspires dancing and a basic feeling of social togetherness. But some forms of idm, particularly the downtempo (Boards of Canada) sort are more geared for the heads. To my knowledge the term 'heads' gained popularity from a KRS One song where he askes "how many real hip hop heads are in the house". A "Head" is now used to describe the listener who plays close attention to the structure of of beats, a kind of minimalism. Intelligent Dance Music, despite the pretensive name is an accurate description. It exists somewhere in between the mental rational realm and the physical, emotive and corporeal realm. IDM in the Aphex Twin tradition makes some attempt at song structure, with the hooks and riffs that engages your humanist side while synthetic chattering textures and microprogrammed drums transform you into Galvitron. After a good hour/hour in a half of Rob Halls' survey of contemporary electronic music (the past 20 years), Autechre's set was a complete reversal. I want to say it was void of all aspects that makes music feel like it is complimentary to our daily lives, or what I've been referring to as humanist. But Autechre is not void of humanism, they start from a place that is purely anti-humanist. Repetative, machine-like, an automated factory, this is where Autechre begins, but they end up with Skynet. The gears and precision and machine noises begin to alternate, with a sense of intuitive logic and irrationality. The sound of becoming a humanist. I've been listening to Autechre for several years now, in fact I just checked their discography and I've heard every album they have put out. My experience with Autechre songs is more on the lines of - an attempt to listen - I usually fail. One song at a time is all I can take. Autechre live is radically different, being engulfed by the volume and experiencing the music with your body rather than only your ears. highly recommended.

Read a more informed review on Milk Factory.

Como te va?

A coworker caught me reading Slavoj Žižek during my lunch. Then I was challenged to define parallax and explain the parallax gap. I thought I had done well, she seemed to understand and was intrigued by the concept.

This is the same lady who usually refuses to speak English with me, even though she is bilingual. At first it was fun, forced me to practice my Spanish, which I comprehend but cannot converse with. But now I find it more fun to reply in English to her Spanish.

The day after we talked about Žižek she stopped in, wanting another explanation. I understand the parallax gap as the interstice between juxtaposing systems. Wikipedia describes motion parallax as the change of angular position of two observations of a single object relative to each other as seen by an observer, caused by the motion of the observer. Simply put, it is the apparent shift of an object against the background that is caused by a change in the observer's position. (kinda like a Sunset Rubdown song "Will you live? Will you live in the physical world? With the sun setting low and the shadows unfurled? Will you live with the way they make you look unreal?" - from "the taming of the hands that came back to life"- lyrics as well as delivery, which is confident yet waivering and fragile.)

I used an example of a person moving from a 3rd world country to a developed one. She gave me homework. "You are going on a journey, you don't know how long you will be traveling and you don't know where you are going. Make a list of ten items that fit into a small bag that you would take with you". She is compiling these lists for some sort of immigration project. Here is my list. I wish I would have fit toilet paper and some basic toiletries in the bag, and I'm not sure I made the best choice of food.

First Aid Kit
Tarp
Hammock
Sleeping Bag
Water Bottle
Water Purifier
Cooking Pan
Oatmeal with dried fruit
Instant Ramen Noodle
A ziplock bag of extra undergarments

Colt Vista !

In other news . . . Aric Naue is playing guitar in a band named Colt Vista. If you've heard any of his self-released cds (On The Verge of a Picnic, Compulsion, Thosepassedoutmissedoutonsecondsminutestoosoon, or Family Chameleon) you are probably very excited by this news. Visit their website www.coltvista.com for more relevant information.

Their next shows:

February 28 at the Know in Portland.

March 13 at High Dive in Seattle.

Tough Subject

Intrigued by the relatively young age of modernism, I decided to delve into some classic 19th century fiction. Beginning with the industrial revolution and then with mechanical reproduction clinching the deal, the modernity that I am aware of is maybe 150 years old, give or take a couple decades. Coincidentally, I recently discovered a genre of music I'm interested in is called 'Modern Classical'. The piano is to music what oil paint is to visual art. What finally turned my awareness of this fact into a curiosity came about when reading Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe. In Beyond Piety he traced the color black as the stardard in fashionable attire to the urbane 19th century, when the soot from coal burning dirtied everything in the outdoors. If your clothes were black it would disguise the layer of soot you carried around. So this is one reason I am reading "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, which is set in England around 1840. I wanted to get a different perspective of modernism, or maybe I just wanted to read a good book. I expected to trudge through purple victorian language and deal with drastic disparities of class. But I did not expect to deal with lawyers in an endless dispute over a will. Thus, the new perspective. Dickens' view of modernism sites relational formalities as a prominent characteristic. The formalities of law in a courtroom, the formalities of speaking to royalty or anyone in a caste/class differing from yourself. Like the time the Japanese principal of Masuho Junior High would not speak to me until I took my hands out of my pockets. Strict structure within interpersonal relationships. The importance of this aspect escaped me, until Mr. Dickens showed me how oppressive the caste system is to the homeless as well as her royal highness. Depressed because you are Jo, the homeless child who somehow earned the nickname Tough Subject, or depressed because you can't disgrace your family name and legacy or acknowledge your illegitimate daughter. Extreme cases, but perhaps the flowery and rigid social guidelines in London, 1840 have been transformed into bureaucratic red tape, order forms, billing departments, online security measures, and what was the name of your first pet? The tedious social norms in drastic 19th century hierarchy are now the delicacies of social networking, mass communication on a grand scale. Not to say that today's class disparities are any better, just expanded and global. BCC me on all emails, BTW. . . . but anyway, what do I know, I still have 153 pages to read.

enhance enigma

links to good music

A great best of 2007 mix from Almost Cool Music Reviews can be downloaded here.

http://www.almostcool.org/test/ACYearEnd2007a.m4a
http://www.almostcool.org/test/ACYearEnd2007b.m4a

Boguey being a Slyboots

"Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house tonight? Is there a a chimney on fire?"
"Chimney on fire!"
"Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy. "See how the soot's falling, See here, on my arm! See Again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won't blow off - smears, like black fat!"
They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back, and says it's all right, and all quiet . . .

The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually assumed by Mr. Weevle, sits so ill upon him to-night, that he abandons that and his whiskers together; and after looking over his shoulder, appears to yield himself up, a prey to the horrors again.

from Bleak House by Charles Dickens



upon reviewing my notes from a meeting with Chris Cozier (an artist and writer living in Trinidad), I remembered the interest he expressed about the variety of ways that different cultures react to modernity. Especially the when it resulted in a sinister use of images.
christophercozier.blogspot.com/

New Mix for a New Year

click on "Surface Noise" a couple times to download my new music mix, and to gently enter 2008.

tote bags for xmas

Tote bags given away for christmas gifts.
"Face with Hair", screen-printed drawing by Ethan Pierce.
(Opposite side)
"Sock Puppet with Mohawk" drawing by Cain Tillman.

George Steiner, "Tongue of Eros"

There exists a fair number of monographs on sexual terms, lexica of the erotic, glossaries of the pornogaphic. What is lacking is any historical and psychologically responsible phenomenology of the interplay between sexuality and words, between libido and enunciation -- either internalized or vocal. No Aristotle, no Saussure has taken up this pivotal challenge. We have, so far as I am aware, no study, even summary, of how sex is experienced, of how love is made in different languages and different language sets. How does love-making in Basque or Russian differ from that in Flemish or Korean? What privileges or inhibitions arise between lovers with different first languages? No polyglot woman or man, so far as I know, has left a record of her or ehis sexuality within and between languages.

kcurterif

Piano Diagram

this instrument first sparked my interest because I've noticed a growing trend of piano driven ambient music. What is it about this classical instrument that contemporary experimental musicians find so interesting?

Then, over Thanksgiving weekend my great-aunt Charlotte gifted me a broken piano hammer. When I was 12 she hired me to remove a forlorn piano from her home. There was a good deal of smashing and pre-teen angst involved with its' removal. Not once in the past 18 years did I notice that Charlotte kept one piano hammer pinned up with her collection of presidential campaign buttons.

New tool, new series

(from wikepedia)
In music notation, a sixty-fourth note (American or "German" terminology) or hemidemisemiquaver (British or "classical" terminology) is a note played for 1/64 of the duration of a whole note (or semibreve). It lasts half as long as a thirty-second note (or demisemiquaver).


Sixty-fourth notes are notated with a filled in oval note head and a straight note stem with four flags. The stem is drawn to the left of the note head going downward when the note is above or on the middle line of the staff. When the note head is below the middle line the stem is drawn to the right of the note head going upward. Multiple adjacent sixty-fourth notes may have the flags connected with a beam.

A similar, but rarely encountered symbol is the sixty-fourth rest (or hemidemisemiquaver rest, shown on the right of the image) which denotes silence for the same duration as a sixty-fourth note.

Notes shorter than the sixty-fourth note are very rarely used in music, though the hundred twenty-eighth note (otherwise known as the semihemidemisemiquaver or quasihemidemisemiquaver), or even shorter notes, are occasionally found.