http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/margaret-kilgallen
Hand scrawl vs. mass production reminds me of doing a theater exercise in college where about fifteen people had to cross a long room and be able to gain a watchers attention. While going from one end to the other everyone was loud, jumping, being ridiculous, all the behaviors we exhibit to get noticed, and at the other end of the room, this guy Hanlon Smith-Dorsey won, because he walked slowly in neutral It was so simple and clever, and it was a huge lesson about contrast for me, to be aware of what is pervasive and to react by doing the opposite. Like marketing, the way text has taken over for the image on subway advertising in NY because we have so many images now, or the way Margaret Kilgallen loves to see the hand in a computer output world, lovely. I really like humans too, and it is strange that the hand has so much to do with economy and community. Back when I was really into graffiti in late high school, I liked the crew Transcend with Joker, Kema, and Mune. At the time my thought process was about who has the right to the eye in a public space and why does our sight get to be bought? Why can't an individual have immediate access, why is public space also privatized? The law defends corporate money, enter my passionate high school frustration about morality vs. cash, and I was upset that one object is legal and useful and the other is not. And I thought about graf like mandalas, made with the focus of the body and the steady hand, just to be painted over, here and then gone. Also I probably told you about really paying attention to graffiti in the past, learning about London by the rats of Banksy, that tags in general changed the way that I understood cities, like an underground map in clear view, associations and connections in public space, able to be registered only by those who notice those signs and paid attention. I also appreciate Barry McGee giving authority to a twelve-year-olds perspective. Because kids don't really understand what's up with the practical world and they are shaping their ethical values and character, they have these passionate ideals that adults somehow should fit into in spite of all the trials of life, and that judgement has a credibility that we all can remember from being young. And this reminds me of a question I asked my father when I was in either high school or college, which is 'what is the most intelligent stage of human life?' When does our chemical make-up and experience breed the best comprehension? And more importantly how can we ever know that answer honestly? The way graffiti still influences my work today is that I am interested in pedagogy as art, taking info with aesthetics into a public arena creating a broader audience and an open sense of usefulness. Maybe next summer you and I can make a gallery space out of cardboard or other free things on the sidewalk for a weekend in Bushwick? Show art and talk with strangers about focused ideas, or create a public poll to be published in a zine where we ask people questions like 'Is marketing a new form of religion, check yes or no and explain'. If you want to do that we can make it up together but those are some ideas that I have been having. I also need to do more work on Museum1, have I talked to you about that yet? It is a museum created by leaving paintings and poems about places around the city as trash and documenting it, drawing attention to the pace that we take through public spaces, and how space turns into place when we treat it with reverence. The dream is that poetry and images arrest us, using that subjective impute of time by others to change a location but also making the words and images disposable, so the art object becomes trash and is just a vehicle to transform the museum into the city, like that network of tagging I was talking about. Another part of the museum puts labels on discarded objects to included them into Museum1, or by collaging a public location with a sense of personal ownership by putting a red dot sticker marking that 'you are here' or that you have in some way bought that view. Its just playing with the idea of Duchamp's readymade again, or Marcel Broodthaers fake museum 'The Department of Eagles', or the playful inversion of René Magritte's 'The Treachery of Images', its an homage to my love of art institutions through a transgressive action that calls attention to their boundary, what is included and excluded. How the public sphere is growing ever more private as people speak in public to their best friends on cell phones, or youtube takes anything and gives it to you on your computer in bed. I need to read 'The Inner Experience' by Georges Bataille where he talks about subjective intimacy becoming lost in the world's ferment, that our secret lives are becoming exhibited cogs in the media machine. If the readymade comes from placing an object in a new context than we can also take a museum and turn it inside out, the rituals of display can be used to make the environment into a readymade. I also just learned that curator has the same etymology as curiosity, cura, and it means to take care, since Duchamp made the artist someone who finds rather than makes, it seems fitting to making spaces that we lose by not paying attention, found again, especially in a time when public parks are being sold to private institutions. Thank you for showing this to me.
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