Mojave 111903
Mojave
*
I have linked to Tom Moody's weblog for a couple of months now, checking in every other day or so. He's an artist, writes about art, and in addition to digital art has interests in other media- film and music, gaming, for example. I find his comments incisive, interesting, and sometimes quite surprising.
I dont' know how Tom discovered my weblog, but he made a very interesting comment about my table drawings way back in late August, extending the logic of Greenbergian flatness, color, and, well, thingness through the minimalists, Flavin, and Lewitt to using code to send instructions to the browser to create a particular display on a monitor. I thought this was an extremely interesting take on the HTML drawings, one I certainly hadn't formulated myself.
Imagine my surprise when I looked at his weblog this morning and found more comments by Tom about my work. He really gets what I'm doing, I think, and I'm grateful, flattered, and reassured at the same time.
He writes about a friend's reaction to the drawings:
"I think on some level, though, my friend still thinks of Ashley's work as reproductions of paintings, and is critiquing them imagining them "in the flesh," with smooth surfaces and crisp-but-not-brittle edges like, say, Cary Smith's. But such paintings don't exist, it's all illumination in your browser. Somehow people with an eye for traditional abstraction are going to have to subtract out that extra step they're taking of imagining the reified image and just enjoy the fleeting thing they're seeing on the screen. This is true anti-materialist practice: what conceptualism promised thirty-five years ago but never delivered, at least in a visually compelling form."
I have to admit to straddling this issue a bit myself. My own ambivalence- hope or denial about my own artwork- is betrayed by the series of imaginary gallery views I created from previous HTML drawings this past January. I've long called these drawings macquettes, as if they were models or sketches for things I would produce out of real materials. But I've also always known , and kind of denied, that my method is one where I find the image through it's making. I knew that as soon as I might attempt to translate one of these tables into, say, paint, that through it's making it would become something else entirely, not to mention the fact the mediums themselves- a computer monitor vs. a canvas- have nothing to do with each other. I think I'm learning to let go of hoping to pull these two things together, and instead thinking about what else I've learned that I can use- process, habits, subject matter, and some loose and general ideas about form, color, and space. But the fact remains, the HTML drawings are things in themselves. They are what they are. And I appreciate Tom's take on this.
I'm pretty sure I'm the only one keeping score here- the list on the far left of this page, "Places I Have Slept," contains 133 names. There are two remaining: Inisheer and Oakland. That means this series, which began August 8, 2003, will end on Friday.
What next? Oh, I'm sure I'll think of something.
Say...
The opinions or statements
expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement
by the University of California, Berkeley. Nor should the
opinions or statements expressed herein be taken as a position
of or endorsement of the University of California, Berkeley.
Links on these pages to commercial sites do not represent
endorsement by the University of California or its affiliates.
|
