Category: The Arts

I just sold my sister-in-law’s camera on EBay yesterday, and today I got an interesting phone call about it.

Since I am a photographer, my sister-in-law figured I would be able to describe the camera and answer questions better, and hence sell it for more. If you have sold stuff on the that auction site, you know it is fairly anonymous, and can be a little less than up-and-up at times. People are trying to scam each other all the time, and con artists contact sellers outside the framework of the website to try to pull one over on anyone who isn’t careful.

So, as the process of EBay dictates, I printed up a label and packed up the camera this morning. Around 1pm, I got a call from a 540 area code number, but missed it. I get calls like this all the time from all over the country, because my number is listed for my business. What I usually don’t get is a voicemail. Most solicitors don’t bother leaving a message. This call resulted in two voicemails, somehow. I listened to them.

The first one was the voice of a man talking very slowly, rambling on a bit. He never quite came to the point, except that he was the one that had purchased the camera and wanted to ask me a question about it. His message ran over time, and cut off before there was any more info. The second voice message was clear, though. His name was Jim Crable, and he wanted me to call him back. He sounded fairly old, so something told me to call back, even though I had no idea how he got my number. The whole time I was dialing I was thinking how strange it was to ask questions about an EBay transaction after the purchase, and over the phone.

A few rings passed, and I started to really wonder why I was doing this. Before making the call, I was about to leave with my son to the Tech Museum, so it made even less sense to call when I did. When he picked up, clearly he was happy I had called back. He told me he couldn’t find the info about the camera on EBay anymore, and that he “wasn’t too good at this computer stuff.” He wanted to know what type of lenses came with it, and if I thought they might work for his project.

It turns out James, “Jim” Crable is an award winning artist in Virginia who is in his 70’s, and who has taught and had shows all over the country and world. He gave me the whole history of how he had been a painter, and gone to some great art schools, but it wasn’t until the 80’s that he discovered the power of photography in his work. He’s had solo shows, and received major awards from museums stretching as far afield as the San Jose Museum of Art to the Virginia Museum of art, and in galleries form Southern California to New York.

He gave me his website address (http://JamesCrable.com,) I mentioned I was a photographer who just got an MFA, so he asked me if I had a website. I gave him my web address.

Twenty minutes later, it felt like we had networked pretty well, understanding where each artist came from and what we were interested in, and what our work was about. We both shared an interest in building images and piecing together composites. I mentioned my GigaTimo Project to him, and he liked that I was doing original work.

Sometimes life gives us weird situations like this, where we just have to play it out. I listened to my gut and called back, and in return I got a fascinating conversation with a stranger about something I love, and that was exactly what I needed. Thanks universe for that one. Jim Crable is a neat guy, and I am glad I got a chance to talk to him.

While digging through a pile of canvases and old paintings of mine, I found this one. I had a period in my early 20’s where I explored different forms of expression. The canvas already had some paint on it when I got it as a twenty-something year old. I added my own ideas to it, and this is where it ended up. You can see I was already commenting on media and society even back then.

Take guess where the quote comes from.

The image seems to be forming a symbolic tension between the noisy background and the framed foreground/top layer. The gray frame, figure, and red gradient are applied thinly on top of the textured background, and really play off of the surface quality of the existing painted canvas. The central gray figure sticks its tongue out, tonally in line with the quote that is stenciled at the bottom. It’s snarky and sharp, but applied like graffiti on top of what was already there. Yet, stylistically the background is the part that is chaotic like graffiti, not the top layer of imagery. I was playing with how media fills the role of both a frame and a commentary, but only in a superficial way. Even in its commentary the mediastic content can’t get too far out of the noise from witch it comes.

Finding this old painting, and looking at it critically has reminded me of something a colleague of mine, DC Spensley, said once in a conversation a couple of years ago. He was explaining how he went into the home of a photographer friend that had passed away, and realized that all his friend’s work had instantly become junk. It was all left behind with little value, and was headed for the dump. DC proclaimed that as artists, all the material work we do just becomes junk at some point. That is unless we become wildly famous, which is as likely as winning the lottery. DC’s solution was to restart his art career as a digital/new media artist. I give him credit for coming to terms with that sifted paradigm.

DC had a compelling point, as smug and stinging as it was. In the post-medium, post-studio, post-modern(?) world where we live, the practice of making art is removed from a sense of categorical belonging. There is no way to tell where an art practice fits in the world just by viewing/participating/feeling it. As the Modern movement of last century made art autonomous from ideas like craft, kitsch and “life,” again there is a notion that art is apart and above traditional places of origin and display. All work becomes site specific with context providing the complete frame for a practice, not just a superfluous curiosity. Craft activities like knitting and paper folding, and digital creations like games and VR’s are political and meaningful in that within an art setting, they comment on the social institutions of art. It is a return to the belief that art transcends the world from which it comes, even as it is existentially tied to it for meaning. I’ve heard this shift called Alter-Modernism. DC’s proclamation has a sense of that to be sure.

In this discussion, I wonder how shifting valuation systems will play out in the art world. What happens to art in a world with a perplexing duality between scarcity of resources and an over-abundance of creative acts. How will the paradigm shift to accommodate resource heavy, material-based arts, and those who simply just create more bits in the digital abyss. Even as context is key, and our post-isms allow for it all, it still seems like the schisms between the veins of the art world are too large to allow for any sort of coherent discourse.

I, for one, always feel as though I am missing something in art conversations. (I haven’t flexed my art critical muscles for a while, so I am sure I am right now.) My underlying feeling that I never will be able to follow contemporary discourse is daunting. As an artist it becomes difficult to talk to other artists except in an oversimplified way, providing artists’ names to somehow provide examples of any point made (something I am extraordinarily bad at). Without a common history or common language, we all remain foreign to each other. Imposing any such history or language, though, just ends up stinking to Modernism.

I am finally getting down to the dregs of what was once my studio at SJSU. There are so many little odds and ends that go into making a body of work, that when its time to clean it all out, inevitably there is a lot of tossing and stirred up emotions.

I still had the M&M’s from the series by that name. About 5 years old now, they still look fresh and edible. Well, not anymore, now that they have been added to the compost pile and sprayed with water. Like burning the shards of picture framing wood from my MFA show last summer, this had a definite performance act attached to it. Plus, it was very cathartic, and photogenic. Who knows maybe I’ll make another series about decomposing art dregs. I”m off to a good start with these photos I think. Here is just one, so you get an idea of what it looks like.