Photo II, Spring 2006

Zaki Jarre’s piece seems much like the artist himself. It has a sweet tenderness that you want to protect but it carries with it a sort of dangerous naiveté that will get him hurt one day. That’s bullshit right? I like his piece. I like that he took an image that wasn’t so powerful and gave it a frailty. The silk does that. The stitching does that. He seems to be hovering over dangerous waters but never falling in. It is the magic trick that is being young.

I think he doesn’t care though. Its lack of preparation was unsettling. It seemed thrown up on the wall and that bothers me. The wall was the wrong place for it. It needed a box or table to lay on. It needed to be kept as precious as it was. I don’t think he cared much and that’s coming form interaction with him and his lack of presence at the show.

Good art is so rare. You know?

I have great ideas and lousy follow through. He has real technique and no concern. It’s like a joke except without the nun and the priest. It seems like he might care more. Maybe he does, just not at the moment.

I reviewed Joe Heide’s Phoenix at the recent Student Art Show at TCC. First it’s a little derivative but only if you know the source and assuming Joe doesn’t know the source, I reckon I’m the only one who cares.

I like the fact that he shows his body. It has a feminine quality. This is a pretty tough thing to do. I ain’t skinny and I know how difficult it was to use my shape on film. I can’t stand to see my own face on film. It’s a real effort to do that so Joe’s putting his skinny pale self out there is guts. Any pretty girl can put her wares out on the table. Joe took a personal chance. Guts.

I like the image. It’s messy kind a blend. I mean the two parts are pretty dissimilar. I like the idea of the blend. It needs stronger parts, more connected, the fire is too real and the body too soft. It’s an either or thing in that piece.

It’s weird how so much of the work I love from fellow students is clearly work in progress. I’d like to see it finished but the idea that Joe was reaching for something, even if in the end he fell short, impresses me. I like to see people reach. It seems like, since no one but us and our mama’s gives two shits that failure is just the same as success. You might say, well I know how not to do that now. Maybe down the road it could matter but why?

It’s like that Zen story about the rooster. I reckon the painter had more fun painting the 5000 practice roosters than the one perfect one because then he was done. Finished is pretty boring right now.

Oguibe Olu is a Nigerian artist/theorist who I just discovered. I mean to say that I am learning of his work late in the game. It’s conceptual but not in the obvious way. It exists without explanation which is my biggest complaint with Conceptual art. Usually you look at a Conceptual piece and once you get it, once you understand the statement being made, you’re done. It does invite you back. It does need another look because you got the message. At best, you come back in five or ten years and ask yourself if it still seems like a relevant message. Conceptual art tends not to hold up so well as by it’s nature it’s topical.

Olu’s piece, Brothers IV is with any explanation as is his piece Buggy. They are images or moments that ask us to think about them by the simple act of their hanging or installation but then there is this other thing: they stir. There is something of in the boys, there is something funereal in the Buggy. There is innocence. He gives us enough image that we might start the process of thinking about the idea, the concept and then he stops.

He wants us paying reverence to the child, to see the child in Buggy as special but he doesn’t say why. He isn’t interested in that. May we don’t need it but maybe it allows us to bring our selves to the picture. It is the trick of all good art. The less I tell and the more I saw, the more you might see it as open. It’s the first good conceptual art I’ve seen and but good I mean it doesn’t fall intot the trap of the one time fits all meaning that is usually implied in this type of work.

Brothers is different. It’s open just like Buggy but without the construct. It’s the ties. I mean I see how haunting it is, these boys have an air about them that is daunting. They seem tougher and frailer at the same time than, they are so on the cusp of destruction, of danger. These Brothers seem to me to be apart from the world. They more alive and ghosts at the same time.

And then the pants and tie are green. It says, these things are special and I imagine if you were poor and you had those snazzy pants and yes I said snazzy pants, you might be pretty proud of your uniform. These are school boys. That’s something to be proud of but they are also frail and this good fortune might get stripped away at any moment.

This project was a sack o' shite. I got this negative of this brick building and a tree but not even an interesting brick building and tree. I dioged out the building and drew cartoons of an alien named Ricardo. Babs was not impressed. They are not included. Maybe some day. I gave my partner Daniel a 4x5 negative of the girl from the Fabrication project. He made a contact print, tea toned it, put in this spindly old fromae witha locket, and old timey'd it up. I was very depressed and did this. I have exclude the third one, yes there were three, but you get the point. I also made masks of my face with eyehole cut outs that people could wear so that they could "see the world through my eyes". It livened up the entire critique and I'm pretty sure it was why Babs gave me an A.

I was lookig forward to the time I'd need for the Off the Wall project and I figured I'd do portraits. I was in Orlando and Voila! I got these. The first two are of a friends daughter at a party I attended. The second picture is of the girl's mother and my friend John. Both people are very dear to me. I'm only showing one of the pictures of them I submitted. I need to scan the others. I think there were actually three. I also included two images of my mother but I've not included those. Babs gave me a B because I submitted six prints instead of four. She said I needed to be more selective, that being an artist was about making choices and by including the last two, the ones of my two firends, I had chosen badly. I've lost the original note, sorry.