Project 52 for 2010: an intermedia Performance / Video artwork is existent on the web in the form of 52 video / performance works, one realized each week of 2010. The work is by nature diaristic and intimate, yet grapples with travel, dislocation, and global events. All of the pieces mark time, reflecting thoughts and feelings of the moment. Some pieces stand as conflations of emotional connection to place with dutiful art production, others are whimsical flights into formal tropes momentarily unconscious or fully cognizant; all have back-stories.
SOME STORTHAND BACK-STORIES:
52: culminates two years of wearing the same “uniform,” grey work shirt and blue trousers every time I set foot on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Lowell. During that time only one person ever said anything to me about it. The deeper meaning is even more a (unconscious) metaphor for the two campuses of UMass Lowell, North (science & engineering) and South (humanities, arts & social sciences), and my blue and grey uniform, yet my body presented the “North” (top) in grey and the “South” (bottom) in blue reversing the color forms of the American Civil War… My thought is the poles are somehow reversed in Lowell (see: my portfolio archives for 2-D discrete works titled “Pole Change” from ’05 / ’06 when I started living in Lowell).
51: Gigi, the rabbit is this piece, is a stunt bunny. She acquired this moniker, from me, by being easy to place in position and photograph, and I figured I should give her a featured spot. I play guitar on this piece and was very pleased with the synchronicity.
50: winter solstice. Doing this work made me very aware of the changing of seasons.
49: is excerpt from “Close Encounters (Superhero Action)” a performance piece I did at the Staten Island Museum in New York. I asked each person who wanted to enter, “Frisk, Hug or Abstain?” and depending on their answer I engaged them. In this iteration each participant received a color coded paper tag with a star, or if hugged they received a cookie.
48: I was thinking of Mondo Cane (1962) a “documentary” about food, sex and violence. I say “documentary” because although it uses real footage the narration puts the movie into another place. Anyway, the narrator in Mondo Cane at times replaces the voice of the subject, and I really found it strange to have someone clearly speaking but have a totally different voice or soundtrack. So, when I had the inflatable piece ready to deploy I wanted to make a continuous shot of my studio with discontinuous content—pan, me waking in, then out, then pan, repeat—then giving a lecture like an engineer or scientist, all the while the “experiment” is taking form behind me, while stereotypically oblivious. Sleepercar (http://tembloroso.com) is the band playing, and this song, although about Texas, fits this moment in my brain.
47: is my retake of Skip Arnold’s “Girls in Bikinies” (1983) (http://www.skiparnold.com/); when I made this I felt like I was ‘getting fucked all day,’ and not in a good way.
46: documents my train rides from New Jersey to New York City and back again during Thanksgiving weekend. We spend Thanksgiving in New Jersey with curator Lydia Grey and her family, a pilgrimage I have been making now for 11 plus years since the passing of my mother. The title is a play on “Train in Vain” by the Clash (1979) the last and unprinted song on London Calling. The soundtrack is the Bouncing Souls, and ambient sounds on the train. Resonating on a deeper level the “vein” part refers to my grandfather who spent his life working on trains.
45: simply green laser equals the Hulk in my studio basement. Bruce Banner was the Hulk, but you should know this if you are reading this. Check under the hood and there is a little Hulk in us all—pure green Id.
44: is a phone call with curator Lydia Grey.
43: is my homage to the profundity a priori trope of flesh meeting posed form, and how it might just be as deep as an aqueous scatological (watery shit) one. Shit is the beast inside the beautiful flesh, but man it is better out than in.
42: is by most accounts, a failure, and might be a counter illustration of the Beat idea of “first thought, best thought.” But I still find something endearing in its sad attempt (lookout for “11 years in the making”). I give special acknowledgement to Netflix for such easy access to this antediluvian TV footage.
41: Uma died on Columbus Day. We had to stop at Loews to buy a shovel on the way home from the vet. She liked when Jean would sing James Taylor songs to her. I don’t think I have ever wept so much. It is a strange and moving experience to have a pet die, they are enigmatic and sometimes leave more of a mystery than humans, and maybe that is why it is so heartbreaking; the unrealized experience of animal-human interaction. Or maybe it was because she used to lick my knee and I loved her.
40: is how brains work, making wild connections across ideas, finding common ground and acting. I think about the numerous times I have watched The North Shore (1987) and Blue Crush (2002), and what are my takeaways? “You should go to art school instead of surf,” “you don’t need to clean your room while on vacation, but you should,” and “friends treat friends more better…” in fictional surf films, oh and yellow Casio G-Shocks are the fucking bomb!Cut to a 15 year old kid, skinny, tan, an out of place mountain city kid now able to see a small triangular slice of the Pacific from his new home. He is looking into the watch case in the electronics section of Longs Drug off El Camino Real (you know, near where the Trader Joes is now: 33° 2'52.99"N 117°15'25.24"W), but the $35 it would take to get what he wants seems so far away… and shit what would his friends think? Yellow watch. Besides, he has had the same silver Lorus digital since 6th grade.
39: is a moment of contentment, four of my favorite things, shared unashamed and intimately with the viewer.
38: is what happens when I am given a $1 Chinese “Swiss Army” knife (by Alex Eagleston, a student of mine), and I start thinking about my place in global material culture: Japanese watch made in Thailand, American pants made in Honduras, German gun manufacture t-shirt made in El Salvador-printed in the United States, South African wine, American beer made in the German style, and a Swiss Army knife (in this case, my first, a Victorinox Champion circa 1980). I have subsequently performed this piece live twice (using a new Vic Explorer), and each time the $1 knife managed to open a bottle of Hungarian wine but has yet to open a can of Californian olives.
37: Through a technical fuck-up the light on my video camera is partially blocked by the wide-angle lens I have on it. In the vein of simple performance pieces, I started rubbing my face and I liked the ideal of an eclipse of a soul and the anxiety of that experience dovetailed nicely with the technical quirk of my camera. I liked the sandpaper sound of my beard in this piece too.
36: I look at this video now and can't help but think Uma was not well, but it is hard to tell with rabbits. They are prey animals, they hide their symptoms so predators will not single them out. This is a ridiculous video celebrating a creature who seemed only built to love and be loved, she was such a sweet rabbit.
35: I was thinking of the Viennese Actionists and Rudolf Schwarzkogler who infamously did not “cut” off his penis, and wanted to tie a similar form into trying to plug the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico: an open phallus spilling forth “oil” trying to be plugged with paper and flour to David Bowie’s “Oh! You Pretty Things.” This piece is wading in the pond created by Paul McCarthy’s great “Ma Bell” (1971) video, as well.
34: was a mental block. I was tired and out of ideas, so I took a breather. But as it happens with so much art the breakthrough is found in the fuckoff. I thought of “taking a breather” which is to catch ones breath, but to force this metaphoric need I did pushups to make the need literal and real, to cut through or break through the block. This very literal video relates entirely metaphorically to getting past a static period.
33: is a dream of a chocolate candle. In the attempt to light the candle I found a signalling to other forces. Numerous people have told me they don’t get this piece, but if we think of a candle as fat fueling a focused substrate (a wick), why not chocolate as the fat? I think of this piece as quintessentially Jeffers, part alchemical science, part spiritual pseudo-ritual anchoring totally transparent performed action. It’s a fucking chocolate candle that shatters, blowtorch, dust mask, out-of-doors, the Mesoamerican god of chocolate…fucking chocolate candle, that is badass!
32: is my experience on Cape Cod, complete with tortoise sex.
31: is my second trip to California in as many weeks, only compounding a profound sense of confused homesickness as I was having a hard time figuring out were “home” was. I spent my time in California fueled on tacos and wine, displaced, comfortably homesick for an imaginary home, belonging bicoastal.
30: I spent year waiting in Encinitas in the late 1990s, and now it feels like I have spent years waiting to go back.
29: I thought of the trophy of a cartilaginous fish; a trophy of a conquest over summer might look like this.
28: when a wick burns down too far leaving unused wax is the candle useless? I wanted to rehabilitate a candle for my wife Jean, as she likes candles. I thought of Sonic Youth, and the Gerhard Richter cover of Day Dream Nation. Also, it was nice to see crochet in video.
27: is an exposition of how loud my studio is, and how psychically loud Lowell is, there is no quiet reflection in this place. I sometimes think that is why Jack Kerouac had to leave this city, the energy at some subterranean level runs counter to progress.
26: S.A.F.E. is a video of the season, but I think the title is subtly ironic as summer brings with it a host of dangers. I thought of this as a ritual welcoming the sun.
25: I am big oil and big oil is me. Until I can walk for all the basics of life I am consuming large amounts of oil; this piece is about that and again a reaction to the spill in the gulf.
24: is my reaction to a call for work about summer action movies. Blue Thunder seemed to cry out to be reflected in my eye, in one of the best trailers from an 80s action movie ever.
23: is standing on the beach and watching the “crude” flow. I find the word crude describing oil as curious as refined or refinery. The Beverly Hillbillies rhymed food with crude in its theme song, and something of a judgment occurs to me about a time for “crude” and now; yet we can’t shake the stuff. What is refined about automobiles? Gasoline. I am knee deep and it is underfoot.
22: is an exercise in scale and quantity. I make everything because I draw.
21: is bearded androgynous voyeurism. I was thinking about the nude and how Cybil Shepard on Moonlighting always had that amazing Vaseline lens. I entered this piece into a show about the Nude it was rejected. Later I saw a catalog from the show filled with conte crayon drawings and I thought two things. One, this video is not sexually arousing (i.e. no fun to masturbate to, unlike fucking drawings of lush breasts and guys with veiny semis). And, two, that venue does not really exhibit video even though they say they do, lies!
20: is the first in the “Crude” series, my first reaction the gulf spill. I set the titling tone, “crude (number) action.” The title is a nod to Ken Anger, that gay Satanist (technically a Thelemist) genius who brought us Scorpio Rising. Rightly or wrongly, I think of him as the father of music video, and certainly the artist I look to for precedence when shooting three minutes of my reflection in chocolate syrup with a driving guitar soundtrack.
19: this video is a simultaneous fuck-you and loving embrace for the idea of hyperreality; an embrace for the stimulating world of ideas and philosophies, and a grand fuck off to the people who wield ideas like weapons and make (for the most part) fucking boring work, and even worse bedfellows, friends, academics, and coworkers—like Salinger-esque “phonies” the lot of them. My fighter shadow boxes in a construction within a construction, within another, sweating the frustration of a fictive fight, perhaps yearning to really fucking hit something.
18: is a piece about literally a pedestrian relationship, a body in space from its—in this case my body’s—perspective. Simultaneously, “up” and “down,” the space above and below, starting outside my home moving inside, with just the sounds of the neighborhood and kitchen. Up, down, outside, inside gave me four spaces, “quadraspatial” and mundane.
17: is video documentation of an interactive low-tech sculpture I gave to an auction to benefit the Student Art Union at UMass Lowell. I have been working for some time with the idea of comfort, and specifically “improvised” comfort as a collective unconscious foil to improved explosions.
16: is a tribute to the Sex Pistols and was shot at the Chelsea Hotel is New York City which is not without its friendly ghosts.
15: I had a series of bad and painful collisions to my body one to my foot and the other to my pelvis, which I deemed worthy of documenting. Meanwhile the earth was erupting, in geological terms, and extrusive event, while an intrusion is slow and sneaky rock pushing up. I had my computer read a local Boston.com report of the Icelandic volcano and the comments following as the soundtrack.
14: I wanted to make a visual poem in a very literal sense outlining the good things in my life, acknowledging the “villains” but not naming them. One of my problems is spelling; especially when it needs to look a certain formal way, “mosly” was certainly an example. However, fixing the mistake really makes the piece for me, building another layer and making it more endearing.
13: This was my Easter piece. Olympia was a foster rabbit—I should say bunny, as she was very young in this piece and not nearly as big as she eventually became—who loved to chase shiny things like the camera lens. I had watched Olympia grow into this magnificent personality, and reflected on the pagan symbols of Easter, knowing she would eventually have to leave—as she was just getting too big to fit through the door of the only cage we had for her; a kind of “death” in her departure. I choose to remake Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart as that is a fitting statement about Easter, and Olympia, and the reason’s we use to justify a cycle of existence, filled with tricky simple dreams and traumatic stress. I.C. is for Ian Curtis.
12: is simply my heart beating.
11: is an exploration of the center of my back, set to a soundtrack of Gene Kranz and mission control for Apollo 11. I thought of discovering my own spine then shot the video and thought it looked like footage of a moon landing. I also wanted to prove I had a spine.
10: is an illustration of myopia in response to a change in the fundamental structure of employment reviews at UMass Lowell, personal turns political turns into misuse of power.
09: is the emphasis that the pattern of hair on my chest looks like an eagle!
08: initiates this idea of modified vision, I think an important vein running throughout this work.
07: is a work for Logan and myself. The soundtrack is my heart beating. The title is a nod to Logan’s Run (1976, film).
06: was shot in Chicago during a conference. Early morning in hotel rooms I tend to wax formal with photo and video. In this work the image plane seemed to envelop the space of my body, reminding me of the cinematic depiction of Tony Stark inside the Iron Man armor, which interspersed with snowy aerial photos, felt like flight—not to mention how the lamp glow ended up a disc in my chest.
05: I built this large plastic inflated pillow in my studio and it reminded me of an stereotypical extraterrestrial environment; either inside a space ship or the kind of human erections around a “crash site.” There is also a kind of clownish element to this piece, which in the grand scene of my work is there but I would insist it is somehow foreign, or alien.
04: is the beginning of a yearlong quest into what one does, should do, or is meant to do. In this work I fold the twenty-something pages of my curriculum vitae into paper airplanes and throw them at an aimed laser pointer pointing at the camera; simple as that.
03: is a formal exercise in sight, sound, and camera dynamics. It does however fit within my oeuvre of work related to airplanes and flying objects. This piece is one of only two in this project in which my body does not appear.
02: is hopelessly layered with meaning, starting with Logan and Uma’s relationship, my relationship to the rabbits, their relationship to dancing, and it goes on and on. Set to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” I take all these “bad romances” into account. I am questioning them all with tongue-in-cheek, after all none of these relationships are really bad or romantic—save maybe Uma and Logan’s, but they were both fixed and more like chums, but Logan did used to link all the fur off Uma’s tail. The piece is funny and meant to be, and the rabbits played their parts with professional aplomb. This is also the first piece shot in High Definition.
01: is a Nintendo Wii battle between the polar philosophic extremes according to Rudolf Steiner—Anthroposophist, educator, and founder of Waldorf Schools—Ahriman on the side of technology, industry, and grounding force, and Lucifer on the side of creativity, spirituality, and flights of fancy, and the Christ force in the middle balancing the two. In this work I play Wii Bowling, creating two “Mii” one for Ahriman, looking like Hitler, and one for Lucifer, looking like The Sandman (Neil Gaiman) depictions of the fallen angle of light, blond with a beauty spot. If one were to take the next step, I would be in the center both figuratively and literally placing the attainment of balance or in Steiner’s terms the Christ Spirit in my hands. Ideally, the game should be a tie. This was the first video and not shot in HD, and is the first work—one of only two—in this project where my body in not on screen.