Monday, August 27, 2012

long, amazing vid



Oh, I want to give talks like this.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

reading about fluxus...



...and these songs keep getting stuck in my head.  Oh Yoko!



If you wait until the last 2 minutes of the 2nd video there's a classic joke re-enacted by John and Yoko, one I remember doing with friends all the way through sophomore year of college, and never knowing it was a John+Yoko reference (I mean, sheesh, how many folks had seen this video before YouTube?).

There are awful comments about Yoko with both these videos.  And, I have to admit, she's hard for me to watch.  But she must have a great sense of humor.  John certainly did.  I wish people hadn't felt the need to take the Beatles so seriously, because they had such a capacity for joviality- to me the most important of qualities.  Help! and Hard Days Night are both great comic films.


I also have always looked forward to encountering Fluxus re-collections. So many of their jokes seem to slip in under the radar.  When I visited the MOMA in Januray there was a whole, lovely, empty wing of Fluxus related detritus. I giggled myself silly reading such bizarre and nihilist poppycock behind the very expensive glass protecting it.  The nicest thing, though, was the lack of people. This photo recreation with the cardboard cutout was by far the best part.  Looking back on it now, maybe this is the way I should do my work.  Do an installation, photograph it, painstakingly document what was in the photograph, and then box it all up and preserve it for history, complete with cardboard cutout.  Hmmm...

oh yo o o ko... oh yo o o ko... my love... will...turn...you...ah-on...

Iphone videos by Rory Sparks







vids taken by Rory after I had left Portland today, and Em Space yesterday.  Super Duper.  The first one is so beautifully jaggedy, and the last one is just so funny.  It will never cease to amaze me how other people's documentation of my work shows me so much more about it than my own.  Here's to excellent friends,

Monday, August 13, 2012

A day off from reading...mostly...




My mentor from First Semester, Miss Rory Sparks, runs a print shop in Portland's industrial area, (http://www.em-space.org/), and today, my last full day in Portland for awhile, I decided to play with balloons.  I sat outside Em Space in the hot Oregon sun in half of a bikini, with a hot pink helium tank and a big smile, and greeted folks as they entered an exited the springwater corridor, a popular bike route.  Guys from the Ross Island Gravel company came out to chat, and generally it was a nice way to spend a brilliantly bright August afternoon. I shot video as well, possibly to sprinkle throughout a new website project.

One of my new assignments is to come up with two paragraphs to describe my process. Part of it will have to be about shopping, which I find hilarious.  But often I find that a big part of what I do has to do with availability of inspiring materials.  That probably makes me shallow. Nonetheless, it's true.

As I was leaving, the owner of the fixed gear bicycle featured in the last photo came out to unlock his bike. I watched from inside my truck, surreptitious.  He looked, walked around the post, and then got out his iphone and shot pictures of the small sculpture. Made me feel extremely happy.  And motivated to go read more about conceptual art.