tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909682013990446428.post3384828530943935245..comments2022-12-29T00:18:57.710-08:00Comments on my blogs: October 15 PosttransartIHhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08310159307923099970noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909682013990446428.post-2327782512820737792016-10-24T10:22:46.391-07:002016-10-24T10:22:46.391-07:00As for the paintings, they're thrilling. (Inte...As for the paintings, they're thrilling. (Interestingly, I think these have more of your bodily presence than anything--the gestures are so dramatic, and confident; it's easy to visualize you working w/the brush.) The ones I'm personally drawn to (here on my laptop anyway; to see them in the flesh could be a whole different experience) are #s 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and then others later on (I lost count) that are more white, with the slashings and mappings more obscured. Overall I love how you're very explicitly working as a cartographer of sorts, routing and delineating and directing the painting field. I also see very real connections between this work and your ode to the city of berlin--your focus on streets, architecture, and how that video presentation, again, creates its own map. (I have two books here in my office, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, by Peter Turchi, and also The Map As ARt: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katharine Harmon; I think you'd like both of them.<br /><br />(Also, is there any way to follow your postings on the blog? If so, I haven't figured it out. I'm only seeing these today and because you mentioned them in the email; I wd've responded sooner if I'd known this was up there.)<br /><br />Such a wonderful, multimedia output of work so far this semester. Plus the gallery shows, and everything else. You're raising the bar for the rest of us, to be sure...<br /><br />Derek<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909682013990446428.post-90840871160681420632016-10-24T10:15:26.904-07:002016-10-24T10:15:26.904-07:00Hi Ira,
Re: the shadow portraits, and imprinting ...Hi Ira,<br /><br />Re: the shadow portraits, and imprinting your outline onto these sites--I'm intrigued. At first I thought you were literally there, at all of these sites. Then I figured, that just can't be--so, you're attaching the site to the locale where you took the photo? If you had actually visited these places to take the shadow portraits, that would've been fascinating. Assuming that this wasn't literally the case, I'm not sure how to think about the work.<br /><br />I do though think that there could be a lot more reflection going on with this. Obviously this issue of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung is crucial for you, and runs throughout much (all?) of your work. There are stories there in that which might be good to explore further, and give us access to maybe?<br /><br />Re: your reading of Celan--I think your voice is perfect for this. I'm listening to this again after watching the video, and I think still that the music, fine as it is, maybe competes with your own voice (and the intriguing echo accompanying it.) I'm also wondering too what else you might want to do with your voice, and the text. Layer mutliple recordings? Let the language begin to stutter, or degenerate, or repeat? What if you were to listen to your voice abstractly, as music, devoid of literal meaning--and recut, rearrange, rework the recording as a sound piece? (Just thinking out loud.)<br /><br />Actually, now that you mention Jenny Holzer (I've loved her work for the longest time), and the bad recordings of Hitler, etc etc, more and more I'm wondering if it might be of value to take a lot of this recorded language--your own, Hitler, others--and explore ways of mixing, mashing, remixing, sampling all of that. (Are you familiar with John Oswald's plunderphonics?) Of course, this would require a great deal of time and effort just to get the technology down--and you've done such a good job w/the documentary, I'm thinking it might make sense to keep going in that direction before getting pulled into yet a whole new technologically demanding arena...<br /><br />As for the last video, here I think the music works well, and the b&w photos are lovely. I have a request (I'm not joking): put together a 1 minute version of this, keeping the Transart images and other enticing shots of downtown Berlin, and then send it to Jean Marie, Andrew, Cella, etc, inviting them to use it on the TI website. I think it would only help the program (personally, I find the videos used throughout the TI website overly heavy re: the performance work done in the program, w/not enough focused on non-performance work. That's why I was drawn to your shots of TI presentations early in the video. I think too it would be good to sprinkle images of other museum sites and the fantastic city in general--and bundle it all up into a 1 min, or at the most 90 sec, video. I think this is exactly the kind of promotional material the program needs to attract more students...<br /><br />Derek<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com