CNN Headline: Malasia Flight 370

A quote from the above CNN story:

"Stephen Wood, a former CIA analyst and satellite imagery expert, said the satellites could be seeing something as simple as whitecaps, which he said can look deceptively like solid objects."

1. Post-Irony: Perspective

Donald Judd, Richard Serra and the rest of them presented a community of artists with a dilemma that many saw as a dead end - a modernist endgame to be either sidestepped or endlessly restated. It was as if Minimalism either never happened or was in need of revision. Many artist's bold rejection explored formalist aesthetics and revisited earlier tropes --we saw reinterpretations of well-established artistic practices while others attempted to reconfigure and elaborate on the essence of the Minimalist agenda. For me the dilemma was about how both a rejection or embrace is fraught with irony. Judd's boxes cast a long shadow and to hide behind that shadow or pretend its not there only reinforces its imposing presence –embracing the endgame it implies.

1975: While I was in art school a new and exciting response was happening –documentary art. The evidence of earthworks, performance art and installations became more important than the activities they recorded. The artifacts of what was ephemeral or inaccessible foregrounded document-making as a worthy endeavor -on its own. The Robert Smithson film about the Spiral Jetty (1970) became a touchstone because the film itself was forced to act as the artwork's phenomenological conduit. The act of representation (shunned by proponents of Minimalism) turned in on itself as the documentary emerged questioning the relationship of artist, audience and object to the creative practice.

A reconfigured function of the document became an art in and of itself --a logical extension of the art-making practice became the formal records. During the mid-70s the John Gibson Gallery in particular championed many new artists who embraced an anti-aesthetic approach to photography. This was powerful stuff to me as I was attempting to subvert the photography making endeavor away from its conventional application --this form embraced photography's most facile application  This to me was of interest but one simple fact gave me suspicions. Photography --a document-- is always about the past.

Artists to consider: Will Insley, Barry Le Va, William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Hanna Wilke, Dan Christensen, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Murray, Dennis Openheim, Alice Aycock, Bill Beckley , Roger Welch, Les Levine, Mac Adams, Robert Mangold

Photographs of the Past

Teylers Museum Haarlem, NL, Forced Perspective Photography

11X14" archival inkjet series, 2011

Two Small Paintings

A painting can be many things --including as subordinate to a photograph.  This is not my intent. I hope that these paintings stand apart from representational documentation (a photograph) and transcend the constraints of an imprint of a moment from the past.

Somewhere (on a body of water) the confluence of light, water, wind and mist form up in the exact way they appear in the paintings at the moment they are being viewed. The paintings I make are a window onto "the now" while photography, and the opening and closing of a shutter, is always about what happened before.

More Water Photography

5X7" archival inkjet, 2013

Two states or three?

-(left) Two different snowflakes that look identical

or two different images of the same snowflake.

-(right) Three states of a tuning fork.

Computer drawings, Inkjet poster, 18X24", 2012

(based on drawings from 1976)

Panel/Control Panel

Paint on two wooden panels, 28X24", January 2014

Paintings from the mid-1980s

The Ramp and the Wheel

2014, Mixed Media, 30X40"

In the photograph it appears as if the wheel rolled down the ramp. When the camera made its exposure it captured the instant the wheel started to pick up speed. Or, has the wheel remained stationary and the camera was positioned at an angle? Either way –photography is always an imprint from the past. The reason photography's assets and limitations are important to discuss is because the past is in jeopardy.

Measuring Time

Photography is about the past, Museum Diorama, 2014

Archival Inkjet, 24X36