Minneapolis Institute of Art
Minneapolis, MN
July - October 2016
Every month you make the decision about whether you should spend your last cash on art supplies to finish this sculpture you’ve been working on that resembles a couch (a fucking couch, and some kitchen cooking pots, because there is a leak in your roof, and you don’t want to use your actual pots or destroy your actual couch, so you were thinking about replacing your stuff with these sculptures you were working on, but you need to finish them first) or pay your rent. The leak in the roof is getting worse, it’s the rainy season, and during the rainy season you never get a chance to fix it because you can’t fix it while it’s wet, and during the dry season you never think about it because it isn’t leaking anymore.
Whenever your landlord comes over the only thing you can think about is how they own you and your sculptures and all of your stuff until you pay them rent, which really sucks because it would be nice if you could finish your work and have it in your house. Put your real stuff in your studio where it would be safe from all the water leaking from your ceiling. Your landlord is actually pretty cool, an artist themselves, but not one that you had ever heard of before so you didn’t take the time to look them up or anything, but they are pretty nice and always have decent conversation, no petty small talk always good stuff that keeps your interest. You owe them money though, and they know it and you know it and it makes you feel upset and kind of hate them even though you like them, because they bought the place you live in and you owe them money and they pretty much own your stuff until you can pay them, but the leak is starting to piss you off too, which makes you think that the landlord should fix it, but it also makes you think that they probably won’t fix it until you pay them what you owe them.
The apartment is spacious for the size, I mean it’s pretty open and it doesn’t feel small even though it is not a big place and you love all your stuff, which has taken you a long time to carefully curate and afford, everything in this god damn world is just too expensive, or maybe being an artist just isn’t fruitful enough yet, hopefully when you are 50 and have kids and stuff it will be, that would be great. It’s also because you like to build some of your own stuff in your apartment so it’s taken a long time to make it or get it from the studio over to your apartment, which is why you want so badly to finish this couch and these fake pots so you can catch the leak and stop it from A) getting all over your stuff and B) filling all of your actual pots and pans, which makes it so that you can’t cook for yourself or be at home because you are constantly needing to go out to eat for every meal. Sometimes you like to make stuff for your walls too, or make some stuff and trade other people for things you want on your walls; those little corkboards that keep post-it notes and addresses and telephone numbers. They always have them in offices, to keep track of peoples birthdays and events and meetings, and you’ve always wanted one in your apartment so you can do that stuff too and remind yourself to pay your rent, but really you have a cell phone and even though you always tell yourself it would be cool to have one there is no way you would actually use it, but would probably just make little drawings on it with the pins you use to keep the paper hung on the board, the little notes about the grocery store, and the guy next door, and the watering schedule for your plants, and when you need to give your dog his medicine because he has doggy pink eye, or how you need more light bulbs for your lamp, or you think you need new light bulbs because it keeps going on and off even though it could be an electrical problem or maybe a ghost or something even better.
Your landlord has kids. Just trying to get that rent from you so they can feed their kids. They’ve needed to get into being a landlord on the side to help pay for their own lives and their kids lives, and that makes you want to pay them the rent you owe them even more, you know. Man, when kids are playing pretend they always want to be in a position of power, always these “grown-up” positions, like they play house and they pretend to be the ruler of the fucking world and stuff, the president or heroes, they pretend to be firefighters and princes and princesses, they pretend to be these rich powerful people, and the sad thing is that we never really grow out of that. That’s the middle class dream, capitalism at its finest, to pretend to be more rich and powerful than we actually are, the diamond in sweatpants. The Eye of Horus staring at you from your hot cup of coffee (you got on your way to the studio, to make your objects that make you feel like a more powerful version of yourself), protecting you from the fatigues of the day, the bills you can’t pay, the interest on your credit cards that you racked up while trying to finish some sculpture you wanted to make a year ago that you did end up finishing and it went into a nice show and then you kept it for six months and threw it away because it took up too much space in your studio and now all that’s left of it is the interest you owe. The Eye of Horus in your cup of coffee that only cost $2 at the shop around the corner, just cheap enough that you can pay for it with pocket change sometimes when you really need to, and every time you do that you think about the change in your pocket and how when you hand it to the cashier or barista, in a way you are handing them a part of yourself, a little transfer of heat, which you actually read about once in a book of letters between Jason Dodge and Matthew Dickman, but you still always think about it because it’s really poetic and nice to think about how when you hand them the coins it still retains your body heat from being in your pocket. They Eye of Horus protecting your hands while you are working, keeping those little fingers safe because you are a pharaoh, or the little kid inside of you is still pretending to be a pharaoh, the ruler of the world, but really you just need to get these sculptures done so you can catch the leak and not have to go out to eat all the time, but remember sweetheart, the rent is due.
…
The familiarity of the objects here are more cinematic than straightforward, as if you have seen them in a film many years ago. They creep into your consciousness in a confused state, the comparison of that which you thoughthappened to how it actually went down. The bastard nostalgia and their dirty tricks; sometimes I remember stuff from my childhood that I swear up and down really happened but my three sisters swear up and down that it did not, but yet I can still look back on these false memories lightly and fondly. What a strange way of looking.
The poetics of a materials history, or more specifically the use of the history of one material/object used specifically in the formation of another object, has been increasingly more interesting lately. For example, Alex Matisse lives in the mountains of North Carolina and is a ceramicist. There is physicality in the production of ceramic vessels, the use of the hands or seeing through your hands to create a gesture on the wheel (or some ceramicists talk about this), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty was fascinated with a short video in slow motion of the gesture of Henri Matisse’s hand before a single mark was made on a drawing, the possibility of seeing, deciding and executing through ones hands “that particular painting which did not yet exist.” These actions are explicably related; it is no coincidence that the great-grandson of Henri Matisse would undertake a career that relies on the gestures of the hand. Alex Matisse lives and works just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, which also happens to be the source for most of North Carolina’s famous clay bodies. If you were to use this clay to make an object, the specificity of that history can be born into that object as well, but only if you want it to.
There is an episode of X-Files where Mulder and Scully come across some strange happenings in the dessert. Mulder and a secret agent working for the government switch bodies when a space ship flies over them. Also in the episode a lizard and a rock are made into a singular object, a man is melded into a floor from the waist up, two lovers are combined face to face while making out, and a penny and a dime are fused together to create a beautiful little form. If you put a penny that was made after 1982 in a fire, you can watch the inside boil out of the copper plating. This inside is zinc and it is the fourth most common metal in use today. Zinc has one of the lowest melting points at 787.2°F, which makes it extremely easy to melt in a typical campfire. Pennies (like all money) are an interesting object because really one cannot or does not own a penny, the penny is always in flux, in motion, going from one hand to the next or from one jar to a bus to another jar to a bank to a paper funnel back into a hand that melts it down and casts it into an object. Never lick a penny ‘cause you don’t know where it’s been or who has eaten it. It takes about 1.5 US pennies to create enough zinc to cast a typical pushpin head. It takes well over 200 pennies worth of zinc to cast my asthma inhaler.