Titus O.

I’ve been fascinated for the last couple years by the ‘concordance’ feature on Amazon, where with many books you can see a list of the 100 most used words in a text. The words are shown in various sizes to indicate their relative frequency of use – you can find the exact number of times it appears by scrolling over the word, and a ballon appears with the number. Clicking on the word will pull up where it appears.

 

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with them, a way to transfer them into other formats or something. For now, I’m just playing with the text itself, of some of the texts that have influenced me most. Here are a couple of them:

 

Finnegans Wake:

little    ah    see    among    love    think    fall    boy    come    day    ear    till    dear    down    end    head    even     great    right    white    first    big    must    nor    give    years    let    shall     old    three    get    ye    hand    whole    own    having    man    heart    long    poor    away    ing    king    sure    know    light    always    went    look    thee    yet    again    son    mean    men    might    best    though    hour    mr    eyes    name    two    night    word    life    once    good    place    de    house    put    now    round    say    call    ever   show    go    last    since    behind    still    take    tell    himself    mind    may    full    time    hear    true    upon    water    four    should    woman    between   thing    world 

 

 

Lotus Sutra:

 

 

 

named    form    vehicle    trees    men    beings    lands    bodhisattvas    great    preach    causes    offerings    come    together    constantly    among    existence    expedient    people    flowers    though    wonderful    four    gained    thought    understand    preaching    hear    thousand    heavenly    himself    human    good  immeasurable    jeweled    sounds    kalpas    joy     king    able    thus     body    know    law    monks    long    preached    verse    man    buddha    two    gains    million    mind    multitude    must    accept    now    number    directions    once    others    passed    world    heard    alms    place    lotus    practice    brahma    assembly    without    sake    saying    see    shariputra    attain    sons    benefits    spoke    sutra    ten    past    kinds    persons    time  tower    living    mean    pure    uphold    various    power    treasures    voices    wisdom    should    extinction    words    hundred

My friend James Cope over at the Goss Michael Foundation was kind enough to invite me over to the space for lunch and a talk by the artist James White, who is their current specimen of triumphant Brit art success. He paints black and white photo-based work, often of rock accoutrement and other sorts of trashy stuff that one wouldn’t normally think of as art-worthy; but of course now most art is really either about trash or actually made of it. And that’s an interesting discussion in itself. Or maybe it’s not – just “Most art has trash in it now.” “Indeed, doesn’t it?” The End.

 

I went with Stephen Lapthisophon , who if you don’t know his work, is one of the most interesting artists around. After 30 years in Chicago, he’s just moved back to Texas, where he was raised (and received a BFA at UT.) He has a show at Conduit next month. Don’t miss it. Anyway, I thought he’d be good company. His actual physical vision’s not great, but his nose for bullshit is honed, and his eye for real talent or insight sharp as a tack.

 

I’ve been known to give Kenny Goss kind of a hard time about his gallery. Just in print, as until today I’d never met the man. I’ve just found it often to be heavy on hype, light on texture – like eating lemon meringue pie without any crust. You have to cut all the sweetness, fluff, and goo.

Stephen and I had settled onto a window ledge, waiting to be directed toward the sandwiches, or toward some hidden room with actual chairs to hear the promised talk by the artist. I figured I got invited since I write, a press preview kind of thing. Kenny literally burst in, introducing himself all around, and apologizing for the artist being late, again (I guess Tracey Emin recently kept the hoi polloi waiting for an hour or more at her closing.) He’s like a Tasmanian devil of energy, this guy, burlier than I expected, but looking very fit and stylish, in jeans and t-shirt with the GQ tuck and hair mussed just so. Like everyone I suppose, I thought, George Michael’s husband – wow, that’s cool. He seems like a very nice fellow – if not really inspiring one with particularly deep vibrations about life or art.

 

A bit later, this shaved-headed, very British-looking dude comes in, tall, in expensive shades, white t-shirt, dark jeans, and mint-green Chuck Taylors. A photographer starts taking pictures, and the guy looked like a real rock star, totally blase and over it. I figured it was the artist.

White, we were told in Italian accented english by the director, is “too shy” to give a talk, but if we wished we could be introduced personally and he would be happy to chat with us about our specific burning questions. I looked to Stephen, half-way through his roast beef sandwich at this point, and said “Well, you ready to head out? I’ll get a glass of wine and we’ll polish these sandwiches off.” I didn’t blame the artist for not wanting to talk. He no doubt felt like he was slumming. The crowd consisted of about a dozen women, none under 50 or especially hip, none of them press to my knowledge, and then me and Steven (I was at least sporting my best Luccheses, doing Texas proud.) We finished, and I grabbed some cookies for the road.

 

Sympathetically, I went over to thank and say goodbye to the guy. Well, tellingly in today’s world, the art/rock star was none other than Max Wigram, the hottest dealer in London at the moment, and purveyor of James White’s art, not its producer. We chatted a few minutes about Dallas, measuring its future possibilities against its current liabilities. He said that in some ways it reminds him of London in the 80′s, before there was much of anything happening, but with a few talented people (this has long been transplant Richard Patterson‘s mantra, that it just takes a few good folks to make a scene.) It’s an overly generous comparison really – I mean, London still is London; even if the art world was recently small and sad it had historically produced Hockney and Freud and Bacon and Gilbert & George, to barely scratch the much-storied surface. And importantly, it had the schools that ended up graduating all the YBA’s who Goss is now importing for our edification.

 

What Dallas does have going for it is being a fundamentally grotesque sort of place that makes you just want to do something about it. No laurels to rest upon. Plus, its cheap. Goss is at least doing something, if a little erratically and with some correctable gaffs (get some more people who know something about art in there Kenny!) If London took a 1000 years to finally become the art capitol of the world, with the rapidly decentralised nature of culture and increased pace of (d)evolution, maybe Dallas in just a couple decades can streak brightly, however relatively briefly, across the art firmament. There certainly is some work to be done in the meantime, I can tell you that much.

I curated a show for and/or gallery in Dallas, open through mid October. Here is the statement I banged out for it, too late for the opening:

“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Form is not different than emptiness; emptiness is not different than form.”

This quote, from the Prajna Paramita Hrdaya (or “Heart”) sutra is arguably the essence of the Buddhist contribution to the global wisdom canon. The historical Buddha’s revolution was to assert the recognition that fundamentally (with nod to Gertrude Stein,) there is simply no there there. Not in matter, not in mind, and more disturbingly to many then as now, not in soul or spirit.

Lest this be misunderstood as the nihilism Buddhism is often wrongly accused of, what the Buddha and two millennia of practitioners of the subsequent related traditions are saying is that impermanence, interdependence, and subjectivity rule the day (this understanding granting vast compassion, good humor, patience, and gratitude, not angst.) Ironically enough, advances in our western positivist/materialist traditions, be it art or virtually any branch of philosophy and science, have already or are all in short order coming to the same conclusions.

The leap from an intellectual understanding to a deeper, more intrinsic incorporation into being is the reason that Tibetans shut themselves up in caves for decades. But this is simply the true nature of reality, and is therefore apparent and experiential to anyone with eyes to see, right now, in this moment (“You already understand!” the teachers exhort.) This is the basis of this Zen thing we’ve all heard about (most familiar these days as a marketing catch phrase, or as an excuse for spacey laxness.)

I spent many years practicing Zen Buddhism, living in monasteries and Zen centers, making it the focus of my creative energies. Previously, I went to art school, where I met John Cage, who frankly blew my mind, and introduced me to the whole idea. Slowly, art became Zen. Later, Zen came back to art. They never seemed fundamentally all that different; still don’t.

Looking to art, at its best, I see assertions of the same reality I encountered in the meditation hall; in artists, the same striving to touch, embody, and live the truth (Dharma) that I saw among ardent monks and priests. This is an historic reality, true for artists always, each generation dancing with the elements and forces du jour, conversing with the Good, the True, or the Beautiful as they find them. Even if, as Agnes Martin put it, they’re decrying its absence, or its fragility.

The artists in this exhibition are all dealing more or less directly and consciously with ideas of impermanence, interdependence, radical subjectivity, and the inseparable, fluctuating, intertwining poles of being: presence and absence, being and non-being, form and emptiness.

 

Terri Thornton meticulously erases New Yorker articles on artists, with an eye to the few bits left untouched that echo in the broadened space, potent with new meanings and significance.

Johnny Robertson attempts to give weight and form to the very atmosphere. In his apparently sliver monochrome slab, you will find the faint traces of some power lines in the living murk of a sky. Suddenly, a seemingly non-objective, formalist gesture becomes a different kind of representation. Space becomes heavy as concrete.

Greg Metz photographs empty office parks at night, secretly surveilling the sleeping carcasses of these spaces in the gaps between their active day lives. The results are eerie, evocative, and strangely metaphysical, deconstructing and reinventing the sort of hidden, mundane worlds we normally never give a second glance.

Stephen Lapthisophon’s installation incorporates numbers of indicators of insubstantiality and change; right down to the fact you can’t even see the elements, hidden in a closed, antiquated box, that are listed on a document nailed to the wall. Other texts on the wall have been mailed out to persons unknown to us, adulterated or responded to in results we won’t see, and then deposited into the box throughout the show’s run. The texts given us (fragments of Holderlin and Heidegger, and a telegram expressing condolences for a death, on yellowed paper itself not long for this world) add up to more poignant uncertainty, and we’re left feeling shimmeringly, poetically unsure of our footing here.

Chris Hefner’s films literally shimmer and flicker, generating an automatic nostalgia, much like Joseph Cornell’s using prints and objects from decades before their incorporation into his boxes. Hefner gives us boxes made of light, containing wispy voices and story book images, that like a good fairy tale, border on the menacing, but seduce with mystery and complex romanticism. His prints condense the same feelings into static form, with head shots of 1930’s beauty queens whose images are in various states of degradation or dissolution. The metaphor is clear.

Kana Harada’s Japanese heritage is apparent in her sculptures and reliefs, as is their spiritual lineage. Her titles often reference Buddhistic themes, and the works are profound physical expressions of deep personal insights, while remaining whimsical and light – quite literally. Most of her recent work has been constructed of a feather-weight plastic foam, carefully cut and assembled. This is the case in her hand-mirror frames, with empty centers that simply reflect space. Her “birdcages” are in actuality three dimensional mandalas, arranged to help usher the mind into more contemplative states.

Daniel Subkoff’s drawings are also informed by his deep familiarity with yoga and meditation. Like Harada’s sculptures, they’re reminiscent of the mandala, but of a purely intuitive sort, with something of a sci-fi twist. You get the sense that in time, deeper messages might emanate from their webs and skeins of loops and fine-point garlands.

Cameron Robbins is an Australian sculptor. He builds machines that look like Victorian scientific apparatus, though beautiful in themselves, are built to record the motions of wind, water, earth and sky. Labeled matter-of-factly with the location, date, and time of creation (“Salmon Point, South Australia; noon, seven hours”) the drawings take you on a virtual walkabout, and you find evidence of not only the wind-manipulated stylus, but how the paper was torn by violent gusts, and how rain, bugs, and birds have spattered the drawing’s surface.

Devin King’s multimedia installation is a mash up of high and low, embracing art, film, philosophy, and architecture. Incorporating sound, text, and photographs, the conversation includes Kierkegaard and Sergio Leone, with King having them meet in a remodeled split level to a highly manipulated, ambient soundtrack.

Rinpa Eshidan is a collective of five young artists based in Tokyo. In time-elapsed films they document collaborative art events that often spill into highly visible public environments. Incorporating elements of graffiti, traditional Japanese painting, ceramics, sculpture, video and performance, they convey a sense of exuberant freedom from prevalent notions of art world “respectability” or success, and its outmoded emphasis on the autonomous, sacred gesture of “genius”.