The Wooly Mammoth's Mighty Absence

Minds Without Brains

2011-12-20T09:49:00.001-06:00

Is it correct to say that plants forage for light, or that they actively avoid shade? Should we say that plants decide where to send out their roots, that they know that they should send roots down into the ground and stems up toward the sky? Is the plasticity and growth of plants to be compared with the free movement and action of animals? These are interesting and important questions that deserve our attention. I won't comment on them any further here other than to notice that if plants have minds, then perhaps they show that you don't need a brain to have a mind, and that's a strange and exciting possibility.

--Alva Noë, writing here

Ghost Birds

2011-12-19T14:19:00.000-06:00

Composition

2011-12-12T18:40:00.002-06:00

Pressings

2011-11-30T23:07:00.001-06:00

Description of a struggle

2011-11-14T21:15:00.003-06:00

I started this painting in August, 2010. After months of work, neglect, a little work, lots of neglect, and then a little more work, I think it is done.

Triptych.

the regenerating organism

2011-10-24T08:50:00.002-05:00

Cancer stem cells have acquired the behavior of normal stem cells by activating the same genes and pathways that make normal stem cells immortal -- except, unlike normal stem cells, they can not be lulled back into physiological sleep. Cancer, then, is quite literally, trying to emulate a regenerating organ -- or, perhaps, more disturbingly, the regenerating organism. Its quest for immortality mirrors our own quest, a quest buried in our embryos and in the renewal of our organs. Someday, if a cancer succeeds, it will produce a far more perfect being than its host -- imbued with immortality and the drive to proliferate.

--- from The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

via The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Exchange

2011-10-18T10:10:00.001-05:00

Like the phoenix, it rises:

johnmartinbell.com!

I'm trying something new out with this one, dudes. So, I've never really had luck selling artwork. Partly this is because I'm awkward at it and don't put much effort into it. Partly it's because I don't like it and it makes me feel weird. I have a job, and I like keeping my art production separate from my livelihood because I don't want to place any burdens on it. If I want to hot glue flowers and weeds and trash together for a week, I like not having to feel like whatever results should have monetary value.

So I've got this "Exchange" page. I want a more structured way for people to ask for paintings through trades, barters, or even just because they like them. Sometimes I worry that people feel weird about wanting art-- they feel like its beyond them or somehow degrading to bring it up. Anyway, I want my paintings to go to different places. There's no set parameters for this, it's totally up to individual negotiation. And I, for one, am open to all offers. I hope that people feel comfortable engaging if they're interested (a big IF!)

I want a way to more directly engage with people that look at and would like to live with my artwork.

I think it's also that I like getting email from people through my website and wish I got more of it.

THE DREAMER

2011-08-26T21:50:00.002-05:00

Snapshots before a move

2011-08-25T20:13:00.003-05:00

I've been packing up to move to a new studio space. I've been so lax about posting new projects, I thought I should take a few snapshots. A couple of them are finished, but most are still in progress.

non-human entities, non-human goals

2011-08-10T08:56:00.012-05:00

Posted: Visualizing US expansion through post offices by Derek Watkins

"Invaders from Mars" by Charlie Stross

"...Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.

Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.

For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion."

The Charlie Stross text was obtained from mentholmountains. The amazing video is by Derek Watkins.

all the rest is silence

2011-07-22T11:17:00.004-05:00

I should say a little more about this, about not writing. A lot of people ask me about it, and I ask myself. And asking myself why I do not write inevitably leads to another, much more unsettling question: why did I ever write? After all, the normal thing is to read. I have two preferred answers. The first, that my poetry was- without my knowledge- an attempt to create an identity for myself; having created and assumed this identity, I was no longer concerned to throw myself into every poem I set about writing, which is what fascinated me. The other, that it was all a mistake: I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem. And to a degree, an unfortunate degree, I have achieved this; like any reasonably well-crafted poem, I am all need and internal submission to that tormented tyrant, that insomniac, omniscient and ubiquitous Big Brother: Me. Half Caliban, Half Narcissus, I fear him most when I hear him interrogate me, next to an open balcony: "What's a boy of 1950 like you doing in an indifferent year like this?" All the rest is silence.

-Jaime Gil de Biedma

via MentholMountatains

Finished Paintings, Vol. 2

2011-06-29T19:21:00.002-05:00

These are a few of my favorite paintings from the past year. A few other selections are below as well.

Finshed paintings, vol. 1

2011-06-29T19:17:00.003-05:00

Hello. I wanted to post some of my favorite finished paintings from the past year. It's been a pretty lousy year for me, painting wise, but I like each of these individually.

May Pictures

2011-05-30T18:38:00.003-05:00

I started this painting and then the next day I found an old wood frame that looked like it belonged to it. Now I just have to finish it. I have been having a hard time finishing.

I'm Not Saying It Should Be This Way

2011-05-01T19:47:00.010-05:00

Whilst [intelligence] is inferior to the natural instrument [instinct] for the satisfaction of immediate wants, its advantage over it is greater, the less urgent the need. Above all, it reacts on the nature of the being that constructs it; for in calling on her to exercise a new function, it confers on her, so to speak, a richer organization, being an artificial organ by which the natural organism is extended. For every need that it satisfies, it creates a new need; and so, instead of closing, like instinct, the round of action within which the animal tends to move automatically, it lays open to activity an unlimited field into which it is driven further and further, and made more and more free.

- Henri Bergson, quoted in Jussi Parikka's Insect Media.

mineral shards

2011-04-26T21:01:00.003-05:00

animal parts

2011-04-26T20:59:00.002-05:00

Pictures from March

2011-04-10T17:53:00.002-05:00

Naming the Animals

2011-03-21T09:58:00.002-05:00

Please join us for two artist receptions
to celebrate our special two-part exhibition

NAMING THE ANIMALS
Curious Matter, April 3 to May 15, 2011
Proteus Gowanus, April 16 to July 17, 2011

Sunday, April 3, 2011
3:00 to 6:00 pm
at CURIOUS MATTER
272 Fifth Street, Jersey City, NJ
&
Saturday, April 16, 2011
7:00 to 10:00 pm
at PROTEUS GOWANUS for Paradise III
& Naming the Animals
543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NJ

THE ARTISTS

CURIOUS MATTER: Lasse Antonsen • Julia Whitney Barnes • Jill Marleah Bell • John Bell • Arthur Bruso • Travis Childers • Matthew Cox • Joanna Ebenstein • Veronica Frenning • Patti Jordan • Heather Layton • Ross Bennett Lewis • Carrie Lincourt • Eric Lindveit • Colette Male • Marianne McCarthy • Florence Alfano McEwin • Hans van Meeuwen • Raymond E. Mingst • Elizabeth Misitano • R. Wayne Parsons • Inna Razumova • Debra Regh • Andrew Cornell Robinson • PROTEUS GOWANUS: Kristi Arnold • William Brovelli • Christian Brown • Ryan Browning • Travis Childers • Clair Chinnery • Eileen Ferara • Richard Haymes • Ellie Irons • Katherine McLeod • Suzanne Norris • Melissa Stern • Jennie Suddick • Tricia Zimic

CURIOUS MATTER is an exhibition venue for contemporary visual art located in downtown Jersey City. Curious Matter exhibitions and publications evidence the pursuit to understand and articulate our individual and collective experience of the world, real or imagined. We examine fantastic notions, confounding ideas and audacious thoughts. Curious Matter strives to foster dialogue among artists at all career stages with a calendar of regular exhibitions. Our commitment extends to our audience as we endeavor to open a door to appreciating contemporary art in an atmosphere that encourages engagement and curiosity. Curious Matter is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.
For more info: [w] curiousmatter.blogspot.com [e] curiousmatter@comcast.net [t] 201-659-5771
DRIVING FROM MANHATTAN: Take the Holland Tunnel. When you exit the tunnel turn left onto Marin Blvd. Turn right onto 6th Street, then left onto Coles Street and left onto Fifth. Street. (It’s about 5 minutes out of the Tunnel.)
PATH FROM NYC: Take the Newark/Journal Square bound PATH train from 33rd, 23rd, 14th or 9th Streets (all at 6th Ave.) or from Christopher Street or WTC. (Note: on weekends the train stops in Hoboken before continuing to Jersey City.) Get off at GROVE STREET station. Exit and walk West on Newark Ave. When you reach Jersey Ave. make a right and continue to 5th Street. The gallery is to the left at 272 Fifth Street.

PROTEUS GOWANUS is a gallery and reading room located on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. A collaborative project, the gallery develops exhibits of art, artifacts and books and hosts events that revolve around a yearlong theme linking the arts to other disciplines and to the community. In adjacent spaces, seven additional projects-in-residence have grown out of thematic exhibitions and partnerships. This year’s theme is PARADISE, an exploration of the light and dark sides of spiritual ascent and sensual escape, in which we invite artists and workers in other disciplines to respond to the siren song of that which is easy to imagine but
difficult to attain.
For more info: [w] proteusgowanus.com [e] info@proteusgowanus.com [t] 718-243-1572
DRIVING FROM MANHATTAN: (There is usually easy parking on weekends.) Continue straight off Brooklyn Bridge to Atlantic Avenue, take left on Atlantic. Go four blocks to Nevins St and take a right. Follow Nevins several blocks til you come to Sackett. Park on the next block (just before Union) and go down the alley off Nevins through the large black gates, second door on the left.
SUBWAY, R or M train to Union Street in Brooklyn: Walk two long blocks on Union (towards the Gowanus Canal) to Nevins Street. 543 Union Street is the large red brick building on right. Go right on Nevins and left down alley through large black gates. Gallery is the second door on the left.
F or G train to Carroll Street: Walk one block to Union. Turn right, walk two long blocks on Union towards the Gowanus Canal, cross the bridge, take left on Nevins, go down the alley to the second door on the left.

This Weekend's Paintings

2011-02-26T21:47:00.000-06:00

Work in Progress

2011-02-09T18:55:00.002-06:00

Found in Borges

2011-02-04T14:48:00.009-06:00

It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being and one of good omen; that is declared in the odes, in the annals, in the biographies of illustrious men, and in other texts of unquestioned authority. Even the women and children of the populace know that the unicorn constitutes a favorable presage. But this animal is not one of the domestic animals, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. And therefore we could be in the presence of the unicorn and we would not know for certain that it was one. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse, and that one with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn is like.

-- Han Yu, in Anthologie Raisonee de la Literature Chinoise, 1948.

image source

1/30/11

2011-01-30T20:37:00.002-06:00

Paintings in Progress, January

2011-01-19T21:43:00.002-06:00

Bits + Pieces

2011-01-18T20:08:00.003-06:00

I have a whole bunch of new paintings, most of which I will put in another post a little later. These are some of the other drawings and small things I have made so far this month.

New Small Painting (In Progress)

2010-12-19T18:44:00.001-06:00

Bell Museum Photos

2010-12-13T16:53:00.004-06:00

New Projects, December 2010

2010-12-13T16:37:00.001-06:00

Book of Sand album artwork

2010-12-07T12:34:00.003-06:00

I know you've already seen this, kind of, but still... I'm excited!

Open Door 6 @ Rosalux Gallery

2010-11-13T21:04:00.002-06:00

I'm in Rosalux's Open Door exhibiton which opened tonight. It's a pretty nice little space they've got over there. I got a couple of sentences in the City Pages review. Thanks Chris for putting my paintings in the show and then saying such nice things about them.

Unfinished Paintings

2010-11-06T17:51:00.002-05:00

I've been painting as much as I can since I got a full time job, but I've had a really hard time convincing these pictures that they are finished. These are some of the pictures I have made since August which remain unfinished.

Book of Sand album cover

2010-10-27T17:15:00.002-05:00

Surprise!

2010-07-16T13:22:00.023-05:00

I'm back. These are some pictures form my thesis show... like 3 months old now. Sorry about that! Anyway, here are some photos. Also, like the new site? Want to pay someone money to make your website look like this? Click here.

I'm on 22:BLOG!

2010-06-19T11:50:00.001-05:00

Exciting!

An Archive, An Essay

2010-06-06T19:59:00.005-05:00

This is a short essay that I wrote for the An Archive, A Forest catalog:

"It is the animal with the big tail, a tail many yards long and like a fox’s brush. How I should like to get my hand on this tail some time, but it is impossible, the animal is constantly moving about, the tail is constantly being flung this way and that... Sometimes I have the feeling that the animal is trying to tame me. What other purpose could it have in withdrawing its tail when I snatch at it, and then again, waiting calmly until I am tempted again, and then leaping away once more?"
- Franz Kafka

The natural history museum is a place to go to put the right name onto an animal; to visualize not only an animal in body but also what it does, how it goes about its business and what its life means. Even taking the most deviant instances into account, a naturalist illustration, whether it is on a page or displayed in a case, is intended to function as a map, a fully-realized picture of what that creature is for the viewer, something which is often otherwise only remotely possible. But this amazing access comes with a price. The creature is necessarily neutered and placed under arrest, not maliciously, but because that specimen must be tacked up, literally or metaphorically, for the sake of observation and measurement.

I think of myself as a figurative artist who strives to depict animals as verbs rather than as nouns. Freed from the rules and limitations of the empirical, as an artist I can avail myself of the luxury of dismissing the named subject, the noun-subject, as a classification with limitations. The real exciting part for me is not in discovering what something is but in discovering that it is and can do so many different things. I want my pictures to operate in the realm of potential—in imagining and bringing to life the heterogeneous and near-limitless variety of form that life can take on to particularize itself and still survive.

This is a type of visual and conceptual navel-gazing in the sense that this process is not terribly efficient. If you put equal weight on every derivation and potential difference from the norm, then you can never generalize and use that norm in a larger and more complicated context. We need periods on the ends of our sentences. But all in moderation! Variation and creative elaboration is a necessary aspect of the scientific process. I want my artwork to serve as a small reminder that life is not rational—life constantly reinvents itself; life bubbles over any container that we put around it.

I have a real website!

2010-06-06T14:56:00.001-05:00

johnmartinbell.com

Butterfly dance

2010-06-06T14:53:00.017-05:00

Some gorgeous illustrations via BibliOdyssey.

snow owl

2010-06-06T14:49:00.001-05:00

Loretta

2010-05-07T16:19:00.016-05:00

Business Card

2010-04-13T14:33:00.014-05:00

4/2/10

2010-04-02T10:30:00.005-05:00

An Archive, A Forest

2010-03-17T20:33:00.005-05:00

We made a postcard for our show at the Bell Museum in June.

2010-03-17T17:47:00.002-05:00

nite run.

Pachyderm

2010-03-16T12:48:00.003-05:00

larger--- a 45" square

larger paintings in progress

2010-03-13T14:47:00.001-06:00

2010-03-08T10:46:00.000-06:00

via Black and WTF

assumed bodily

2010-03-04T07:44:00.001-06:00

The Bell Museum of Natural History

2010-02-24T11:12:00.004-06:00

I am so excited! My pals Ginny, Branden, Alissa and I will be having a show at The Bell Museum of Natural History on the U of M campus. The terrifying thing is that it is going to be in MID JUNE.

photo source

growing paint!

2010-02-23T14:21:00.002-06:00

I think this painting is different.

Penny Davenport

2010-02-23T07:26:00.004-06:00

Drawings by Penny Davenport

via Journey Round My Skull

The third part of my thesis.

2010-02-22T18:56:00.004-06:00

I realized that I forgot to post this. The other two sections can be seen in previous posts.

+++++++++++++++++++++

There is violence in naming.

It seems to me that every case of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost, the longevity of a name that survives whoever carries that name. (Derrida, The Animal, 20)

I would like for us to once again consider Franz Kafka’s short story “Investigation of a Dog,” although this time we will look at the same story from a different vantage point. Maybe what Kafka’s dog really goes through is a sort of crisis of definition. Where he used to take for granted aspects of his life as defined and mastered, his crisis of faith causes him to see the world as shifty and uncertain. The dog tells us, “I find on closer examination that from the very beginning I sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment, causing a slight feeling of discomfort which not even the most decorous public functions could eliminate” (Kafka 278). The dog longs for peace, for a return to the comfortable rouine of something normal. He says, later, “We are the dogs who are crushed by the silence, who long to break through it, literally to get a breath of fresh air” (Kafka 297). The dog is pestered by an itch which cannot be scratched-- a discomfort with the status quo. It is, in fact, a discomfort with any status quo; a fear that stems from our inability to account for the constant shifting around us. French deconstructionist and philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued extensively that the way that the structures which ground our lives are constructed, not a priori given (Writing 17). One of the most pervasive means of structuring our lives is through language, through a system of naming things. Derrida has argued that the concept of “the animal” is a means of summarily containing and dismissing a vast “heterogeneous multiplicity of the living” (The Animal 31). Derrida writes, “The animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other” (The Animal 23). Naming could be considered an act of violence when perpetrated against another person or living thing. It is a means of caging that individual to a limited set of actions and possibilities.

Oliver Goldsmith, Illustration for An History of the Earth,
and Animated Nature, 3rd ed.,1790, engraving and etching.

These ideas seem abstract, but they have very real consequences. One startling example of the reality of these theories can be found in the development and function of the natural history illustration. Depiction has been a part of the study of the natural world since the very beginning. These pictures are rooted in the European discovery of “New World” flora and fauna. Diana Donald writes that, “Growing interest in the minutiae of animal structure and behavior contributed to a Europe-wide project to define, name and group species in a comprehensive taxonomic system” (8).
Even taking the most deviant instances into account, the natural history illustration is always first and foremost meant to serve as a complete map of the animal. It was intended to be an all-encomassing picture of what that creature should look like for the viewer so that an in person encounter was almost implied to be redundant. They frequently display the animal in profile, fully pictured and surrounded by a more or less perfectly defined and containing border. The animals are often paired together so that both the top and bottom can be viewed simultaneously. The eyes are deadened and behave as a period on the end of a summary sentence. The animal becomes neutered and detained to a very particular space.
Some of the best examples of the genre allow this dramatic act of violence to play out on the page itself. The watercolors of John James Audubon, French-American painter, naturalist, and all-around impresario, tend to do exactly this. I always marvel at the exactitude and wide variety of personality that Audubon achieves with such simple tools. He has this quiet, mesmerizing attention to detail. Frequently sitting on the very surface of his images there is a deadness or melancholy which stifles the thing living beneath in a really tragic fashion. I have found the closest description of this feeling in some of Derrida’s writings. He writes, “The sadness, melancholy, and mourning of nature are also born out of and by means of the wound without a name: that of having been given a name. Finding oneself deprived of language, one loses the power to name, to name oneself, indeed to answer for one’s name” (19). When I look at Audubon’s Gyr Falcon, for example, I see a thunderclap of form, color, and pattern a split-second before I place that form and color onto the bodies of two birds. It is that split second in between which gives the two falcons their life, and it is the naming and classification of them which kills these birds in mid-flight.

John James Audubon. Gyr Falcon, 1826, watercolor on paper.

While the degree to which each image follows this course varies, I like Audubon’s illustrations because they balance themselves so interestingly. Just when they seem to be enthusiastically alive they quickly deaden, and just when you want to treat them as a cold taxonomy they stir back to life. Audubon’s paintings seem locked in the same endless cycle of uncertainty and restlessness which we see in Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog.”
Animal scientist and writer Temple Grandin has spent her career drawing parallels between the way that she, as an autistic woman, processes the world and the similar way an animal relates to its surroundings. One of the more overwhelming sympathies is what Grandin describes is a tendency to “see in pictures” rather than in words (76). This is a hypersensitivity to detail and a reduced ability to mentally manipulate abstract ideas divorced from their environment. An animal has a much more difficult time being selective of the stimuli it is conscious of as every single detail demands so much attention that abstraction becomes extremely difficult. In her book Animals in Translation, Grandin has said, “What’s it like being so vulnerable to tiny details?... I think it [the answer] has something to do with a fear of the unknown” (140). What is of most interest to us here, though, is the way that Grandin’s ideas coincide with Derrida’s description of the violence of naming. Both of them strive to prove that structuring and perceiving the world in terms of language excludes a great deal. Grandin helps us more clearly see the exciting potential which is too often overlooked in Derrida-- by understanding the fallibility of the structures we create, linguistic or otherwise, we also open ourselves to the nearly limitless ways of living. Grandin’s “seeing in pictures” is just one potential recharacterization among many.
One specific example of where we can see this transition in action is in the way that the eye, in naturalist illustration or otherwise, can either simplify or complicate a subject. Derrida’s set of lectures titled The Animal That Therefore I Am take the uncertainty of an eye as their starting point. He writes, “Nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through the absolute alterity of the neighbor or of the next(-door) than the moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat” (11). The cliché tells us that “the eye is the gateway to the soul.” In a certain sense this is true, but it is a cliché precisely because it is most frequently interpreted in a superficial sense and is easily dismissed. The eye is the gateway to the soul when it becomes active and tumultuous. Fathomless eyes are, at the heart of the matter, beyond the cliché to a point where the eye’s uncertainty is deeply troubling.

Wolf Rilla, dir. Still from The Village of the Damned, 1960, film.

Derrida’s experience with his cat suggests that the uncertain eye, the eye that is not just deep, but is of an unknown depth, is what can most appropriately be called “the point of view of the absolute other” (Derrida 11). In the unsettling eye we can catch a glimpse of different ways of living, different ways of being which exists outside of the standing taxonomy.
I frequently avoiding painting eyes, and I think it is because the specific, nominal eyes I would paint would fix the figure I am painting in place. I mean that the figure would be fixed in both the illusionary space of the picture and the way that a viewer could go about taking in and naming the figure as a specific subject. In other words, the eye would most likely fall into the cliché-- it would only serve as a short hand for what could be an experience of uncertainty.

John Bell, Foiling The Fox 2009, oil on wood.

The commingling of evident medium and illusory or descriptive detail is a means of keeping my figures fluid and-- to the extent that a painted image can be-- self-defining. I believe that the hesitant figure complicates and therefore critiques the structural wrong perpetrated by the naturalist illustration.

+++++++

New Drawings, 2/9/10

2010-02-09T13:09:00.001-06:00

Works In Progress, 2/9/10

2010-02-09T13:04:00.001-06:00

curated pictures #1

2010-01-21T19:30:00.005-06:00

Leave a comment if you want the image sources-JB

here's a painting you folks have never seen before.

2010-01-21T08:53:00.002-06:00

Thesis part 2: Umwelts

2010-01-21T08:43:00.005-06:00

This is the second part of my thesis. To read the first part, keep scrolling down.

********

2. Umwelts

Shed Your Husk (2009) watercolor on paper, 12”x 7”

In 1934, the writer and biologist Jacob Von Uexkull wrote a small monograph entitled A Stroll Through The World of Animals and Men. In it, Uexkull develops a simple and poetic way of conceiving how humans can best understand the way that an animal perceives and interacts with its world. The subjective “soap bubble” world of an animal’s conscious or unconscious zone of interaction is what Uexkull calls the Umwelt. Critical theorist Giorgio Agamben describes Uexkull’s Umwelt as such:

Where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to the higher organisms, Uexkull instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score. (Agamben 40)

The Umwelt cannot be synonymous with the animal’s life in an exterior environment. Conceiving of the animal within this exterior world would only be another way of describing a human’s conception of an animal within a human’s conception of the animal’s place. Uexkull’s Umwelt is different from this in that the way that the animal’s world looks is determined by the limits of the animal’s perceptions and range of action in response to it. Uexkull writes:
The Umwelt only acquires its admirable surety for animals if we include the functional tones in our contemplation of it. We may say that the number of objects which an animal can distinguish in its own world equals the number of functions it can carry out. If, along with few functions, it possesses few functional images, its world, too, will consist of few objects. As a result its world is indeed poorer, but all the more secure. For orientation is much easier among few objects than among many.” (49)

There is no objective reality in Uexkull’s science. We can draw conclusions regarding the borders of an animal’s Umwelt by analyzing how an animal is physiologically adapted or built to receive and respond to stimuli. Many anthropomorphic perils lie in the way of us honestly and accurately engaging an animal on its own terms. We cannot take even the most rudimentary aspects of our own world (depth or motor perception, for example) as fulfilling the same exact purpose within an animal who may see things very differently.

Jacob Von Uexkull (Belgian), two illustrations for A Stroll Through The Worlds of Animals and Men (58)

One of the most compelling questions which pops up in the study of the animal Umwelt is the relationship of an animal to other beings. In The Open, Giorgio Agamben relates Uexkull’s Umwelt to existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of “poverty in world.” “Poverty in world” refers to an animal’s inability to conceive of other beings due to a complete captivation by its set of relations (Agamben 52). In trying to understand this concept, we should remember Uexkull’s description of the boundaries of an Umwelt, the number of objects which appear in an animal’s world is closely related to the range of functions that animal is able to perform (Uexkull 49). An animal which lacks a basic self-awareness (being unable to recognize its own reflection in a mirror, for example) thus also lacks the capacity to recognize the potential for selfhood in any of the objects which could drift into its Umwelt. Different animals only interact with each other through channels built to fulfill certain selfish needs for the individual animal. Agamben describes it in this fashion:

The two perceptual worlds of the fly and the spider are absolutely uncommunicating, and yet so perfectly in tune that we might say that the original score of the fly, which we can also call its original image or archetype, acts on that of the spider in such a way that the web the spider weaves can be described as fly-like. (42)

With similar implications, Heidegger describes “poverty in world” as a kind of captivation or enthrallment-- an inability to conceive of an object as something beyond the need or needs it may fulfill. He writes, for example, that, “It is precisely being taken by its food that prevents the animal from taking up a position over and against this food” (Agamben 53). It is then perhaps, in considering both Uexkull and Heidegger, that the self-awareness animal perceives other objects in the world as subjects in and of themselves. “Investigations of a dog”, a short story by early 20th century German author Franz Kafka could be read as a story in which the primary conflict pivots around the main character’s “poverty in world”. Though conveyed with the voice of a human man, Kafka strains to tell the story of a hybrid being-- one who, for our purposes could be describes as being caught between Umwelts. The investigating dog is both aware of a broader horizon beyond what he sees and is also still very much ensnared by it. The protagonist becomes unsatisfied with his ‘dogness’ after witnessing an inexplicable event which the reader could only surmise to be a performance of circus dogs. Afterwards, the investigating dog tries to find meaning in the select stimuli that come to make up its environment. Unaware of the existence of humans, the investigator tries to gain understanding through a science that is very much based on a world defined by function. Kafka writes,

My personal observation tells me that the earth, when it is watered and scratched according to the rules of science, extrudes nourishment, and moreover in such quality, in such abundance, in such ways, in such places, at such hours as the laws partially or completely established by science demand. I accept all this; my question, however, is the following: ’Whence does the earth procure this food?’ A question which people in general pretend not to understand, and to which the best answer they can give is: ‘If you haven’t enough to eat we’ll give you some of ours’.” (288)

In both the science which the investigating dog accepts and the way his question is received, the limitations of the dog’s Umwelt become painfully clear. “Dog science” is not based on objective, observable phenomena. Rather, it focuses on the development of a more efficient satisfaction of the need for food. Similarly, despite how much the investigating dog longs to see an answer in the eyes of his comrades, their response to his questions are either inconceivable or ludicrous. The culminating scientific trial, which the investigating dog uses to test the limitations of his worldview, is a hunger strike. The dog says that, “The highest, if it is attainable, is attainable only by the highest effort, and the highest effort among us is voluntary fasting” (Kafka 309). This trial, though, does not result in a widening of the horizon, or any kind of eureka moment of understanding. Instead, it reveals the investigating dog’s inability to transcend its Umwelt. Kafka writes,

Here and now was the hour of deadly earnest, here my inquiries should have shown their value, but where had they vanished? Only a dog lay here helplessly snapping at the empty air, a dog who, though he still watered the ground with convulsive haste at short intervals and without being aware of it, could not remember even the shortest of the countless incantations stored in his memory. ( 31)

Ultimately, the dog fails in his mission to transcend his own limited perceptual state. What the dog can know and what the dog can make of its world is necessarily limited by what it has the capacity to perceive.

*******

I like to imagine the viewer of one of my own paintings as taking an “excursion into an unknowable world”, suspending whatever limitation there are for a brief moment and venturing into another animal’s perceived Umwelt (Agamben 41). Any subjects that materialize within this field of vision would then lack the sense of cohesion or definition that the human brain may ascribe it. Like the jackdaw and the bathing trunks, what matters in the eyes of an animal may not be the definition of another living being, but instead the impression of one.
The formal pairing which was this essays point of departure-- a living presence alongside evident, material paint -- is compelling as a part of this framework because of the way that the former is drawn into question by the later. Unlike the results of our first inquiry in which the material mark and the illusion of presence were both defined by movement, material paint and the illusion of presence are in this case antagonistic. Evident paint obscures any attempt at definition and therefore relating to a unified subject within these paintings. The painted objects, both illusionistic and material, take on a hidden significance-- a meaning which can never be entirely known to us. It may instead only be available in fragments.

When it rains, it pours......

2010-01-12T20:53:00.011-06:00

The Following is the introduction and first chapter of the thesis draft I wrote last semester. I will probably keep the ideas in this first section largely intact.... I may radically revise the introduction and the final part of section one in which I relate these ideas to my own process. I'm a posting machine today, what can I say?

**********

I am a painter who is fascinated by pictures which allow for the coexistence of two incongruous attributes- the impression of a living presence and evident paint. Living presence refers to the sensation of viewing a form that looks back at you; something which seems to possess its own subjecthood. Evident paint, on the other hand, is paint which is never completely submerged in illusion. It is always more or less honest about its physicality and unremarkable nature. The coexistence of the two in a single image is not impossible, but it often inspires a complicated or nuanced emotional experience for the viewer. It is also a prevalent trend in the world of contemporary painting. There is a strong precedent for it in the late paintings of Philip Guston and in the painted photographs of Gerhard Richter. My passion for the Paintings of Cecily Brown, Elizabeth Neel, and Katy Moran is likely one of the primary reasons that my own practice has engaged in this same realm of ambiguity. But now that I am involved in it and am so interested in it, I want to try to determine what this ambiguity can mean for me and how I can define it in such a way that I can own it as my own.
In this essay, I will present three different ways of conceiving of and explaining how this ambiguity effects interpretations of my paintings. I do not see the three of them as different points in the same argument, but instead as potential points of departure that have cumulatively influenced the trajectory of my studio process. I chose them because they reflect one of the other lasting aspects of my studio process: a love for and fascination with the animal. I have found that through the course of this research, the animal and the ambiguity in my artwork are closely linked together.

**********

1. Consciousness is Hesitation

The first means of understanding the tension in my paintings sprang from a close reading of the philosopher Henri Bergson’s seminal work Creative Evolution. In it, Bergson attempts to reconsider the relationship between the natural sciences and philosophy from the ground up. Creative Evolution is rooted in a belief that life is a “current of creative energy”. It is a zone of continual play, motivated not by efficiency alone but also by the incorporation of chance and irrationality (62). Bergson notes this when he writes, “Nature is more and better than a plan in the course of realization. A plan is a term assigned to labor: it closes the future whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on the contrary, the portals remain wide open” (Pearson 67). Life does more than just sustain itself within a predetermined set of conditions-- life bubbles over its container. It not only sustains itself, but exceeds the parameters placed around it.

This is how Bergson makes sense of the animal in relation to the plant. The animal and plant are both alive, obviously, but they respond to slightly different environmental constraints. The plant needs to sustain itself by somehow developing a process in which its immediate environment can provide it with everything it needs. The plant uses the nutrients and energy of the sun, soil, and air to equalize the energy it uses with the energy it is provided with. The animal, however, is life’s answer to a slightly more complicated question: Can something be alive and have to seek out its own food source? For Bergson, every type of animal has to answer to this “seeking out”, this need to move, in its own way. Over time the animal has developed limbs, muscles and a central nervous system in order to better coordinate and propel itself through space (Bergson 155). Animal scientist and author Temple Grandin discusses exactly this difference in her book Animals In Translation. To illustrate her point, Grandin describes an animal called a sea squirt, an organism which starts out its life as a tiny mobile animal with a cluster of only 300 or so brain cells (Grandin 121). It spends the first phase of its life searching for the perfect spot to plant itself. The sea squirt then roots there permanently, turning from an animal into a plant and actually eating its own brain and tail muscles in the process (Grandin 121). The animal is intimately related to the plant. What differences there are between them are a function of the animal’s need for speed.

The Sea Squirt

We can follow the implications of this difference between plant and animal one step further. Consciousness, according to Bergson, has also developed as a function of the animal’s need for mobility. In other words, the same force which gave rise to opposable thumbs is behind the tools of consciousness which we use to perceive and manage our world. The conscious animal’s horizon has broadened exponentially: it can retain memories, it can build mental pictures to help it manipulate or predict its environment, and it can weigh these different pictures against one another in order to come to more informed decisions on how to act. Pearson writes that, “With the human animal the life of consciousness reaches its highest state of emancipation from the restricted movement of matter” (68). In the conscious animal, then, life is best characterized as a more or less consistent hesitation between realms of sensory input and mental projection as much as it is a navigation of physical environments.

It may prove productive to reach out with this idea of conscious life as hesitation to other less expected places. Take this statement by the painter Leon Golub, speaking more than twenty five years ago:

The very fact that the ads and the nightly news and all those things were on together bombarding people in their homes made it all the more horrific. All this atomized chaos, all the controlled and uncontrolled verbal and imagistic garbage jitters in the skulls of the onlookers even as it jitters in the skulls of the media manipulators. We’re up against simultaneous bombardments from a range of media sources.
(Newman 6)

What is of interest to me here is Golub’s choice of the word “jitteriness” to describe the way he feels watching TV. What he describes is a change in the pace of media to the point where individual images and stories are no longer consciously separated, but flow together in one stream of information. It is a shift from something which requires part of one’s attention to something which requires all of one’s attention. Not only is conscious life hesitation, but the way that life is represented in the modern media landscape can be described along exactly the same lines. Both Bergson’s hesitating life and Golub’s jittering media do the same thing-- the jitteriness of both result from the subject’s attempt to turn this scattered array of information into a coherent sense of identity and world. There are other ways of representing the subject which relate to this kind of unceasing movement. In his discussion of the early daguerreotype, Jalal Toufic offers a new way of conceiving this represented life in terms of hesitation. He writes,

The first thing that one notices in many nineteenth century photographs is the blurriness of the living. Since the early daguerreotypes and calotypes required long, multi minute exposures, at first photography best preserved the dead, not the living, the quick (quick. 6. Archaic a. Alive. [American Heritage Dictionary])... To belong to nature whether as an object or as a living entity is to be restless. (161)

For Toufic, blurriness is the most accurate way of picturing the living subject. It is subtle enough that it describes a cerebral or conscious movement just as much as it seems related to a direct physical action.

Jasquith, Nathanial. Mother (circa 1860) Photograph, 1/4 plate daguerreotype.

**********

The ambiguity which defines my painting practice may be attractive to me for some of the same reasons. In this case, the impression of presence and the gestural mark could harmoniously coincide through a shared connection to movement. If we follow the leads of Golub and Toufic, it may be that the most convincing representation of the subject is also the moving subject, perhaps even more so than the confirmation associated with a recognizable form. The evident paint mark can also emphasize movement through the trace of the artist hand. When he briefly discusses the artist in Creative Evolution, Bergson implies exactly this. Pearson writes, “The eye... perceives the features of the living in terms of an assembling and not as something involving mutual organization and reciprocal interpenetration... it is in Creative Evolution that Bergson poses the question: what is the time of a work of art, that is, what is the time of its creation of form?” (67). Apparent individual marks can counteract the unifying tendencies of the eye and contribute to the perceived hesitation of the whole figure. Like the rings of a tree trunk, the evident mark can act to demonstrate its own rate of growth within that of the whole. A short dash conveys a completely different type of time than a slow drip, for example, and when the two are juxtaposed together, the painted subject begins to jitter and move subtly. In this way, the movement of the individual strokes can work in concert to produce a jittering, painted subject.

tune in next week for Section 2: Umwelts

New, as in like months old.

2010-01-12T18:48:00.006-06:00

I've been making drawings. These are made by rubbing some snake and lizard skins. And just by drawing, too.

This painting is finished. I really like it. Like, maybe thesis show like it.

This is a painting I am making. I think of it like I am growing a "garden of paint," if I want to be billowy and silly sounding. Or maybe better: accumulating a compost heap of paint. This photo is blurry. Sorry!

This is a big animal I am painting. It's paw still isn't finished.

I don't know, I just made this.

etc.

2010-01-12T18:25:00.001-06:00

From The Wonderful World of Nature, Roedelberger,F.A. London: Constable and Philips, 1960

Birds

2010-01-12T18:21:00.003-06:00

From The Wonderful World of Nature, Roedelberger,F.A. London: Constable and Philips, 1960

Insects

2010-01-12T18:14:00.006-06:00

From The Wonderful World of Nature, Roedelberger,F.A. London: Constable and Philips, 1960

my second sculpture

2009-12-16T14:13:00.001-06:00

This is the second sculpture that I made. It is a milkweed pod with a rubberband around its midsection. I stood it up so that it kind of looks like an anteater or something.

I have a whole lot of work that I haven't posted on here, I just haven't remembered to bring Ali's camera or to replace batteries and stuff like that. Someday it is coming.

megapost #2

2009-11-05T12:03:00.003-06:00

So, last week I made this sculpture. I bought four cans of expanding foam and then I sprayed them on this log. It doesn't stand upright, so there is also this little wedge of wood that I use to hold it up. Anyway, I really wanted to see how it looked installed with some of my paintings, so I did it, and these are some photos.

megapost #1

2009-11-05T11:59:00.005-06:00

Hi. Sorry for the absence. It's been harder with my camera not working. This is a giant dump of some of my current pictures, both finished and in progress.

The painting above is called "Teamwork", I think.

I like the idea of calling the above "Vain world, adieu", But I think it's probably too lame.

Vignettes

2009-09-25T16:40:00.000-05:00

mammals

2009-09-24T14:40:00.003-05:00

Sorry! My camera broke, so I haven't taken many photos lately. Here is an update. I feel very suspicious of the top one, like it's to literal or illustrative or something.

Hide

2009-09-13T19:56:00.001-05:00

I've been fooling around with different ways of presenting these things. I tried painting a black square on the wall today.

Sep. 12th, 2009.

2009-09-12T16:13:00.001-05:00

Failed Nest and an Arranged Marriage

2009-09-10T17:24:00.002-05:00

critters prostrate

2009-09-09T15:09:00.000-05:00

"This Is How It Really Happened!"

2009-09-06T17:04:00.003-05:00

Ali and I were the victims of a hit and run yesterday. We took these photos to lighten the mood, because the mood definitely needed some lightening.

I just noticed those birds were bats

2009-09-06T17:04:00.001-05:00

these are some more things

2009-09-04T16:21:00.000-05:00

2009-09-02T17:49:00.000-05:00

A new watercolor. I rearranged and cleaned my studio today. It was way overdue.

Iguana

2009-08-30T16:09:00.000-05:00

My friend Ginny left me a present in my studio. A taxidermied iguana! poorly done, at that. Thanks Ginny, for a super cool sunday morning surprise.

Romance Conflict Adventure

2009-08-28T17:19:00.000-05:00

Watercolor

oil, a monkey?

oil baboon!

Some poor photographs of some recent projects.

The Birthday Party

2009-08-21T17:05:00.000-05:00

I finished this painting for the little show going on right now in the MFA Whitier Gallery. Up until now I have hated it, but today I started to think that it might not be as bad as all of that. I think it's got some redeeming qualities. For now it's titled The Birthday Party.

???

more watercolors

2009-08-21T17:04:00.000-05:00

Roar

2009-08-10T19:28:00.001-05:00

watercolor

2009-08-10T19:27:00.001-05:00

2009-07-28T18:06:00.000-05:00

July, 22, 2009

2009-07-23T17:50:00.000-05:00

2009-07-21T20:50:00.001-05:00

fairy tales

2009-07-19T21:39:00.000-05:00

productive day.

2009-07-16T17:54:00.000-05:00

I added the feathers to my jackadaw. I think I like them!

I FINALLY have a companion for my fox that I am happy with! I think it's a lungfish? I don't actually know what a lungfish looks like but that name seems right to me.

better... more interesting.

2009-07-14T18:35:00.001-05:00

the vain jackadaw

2009-07-10T08:14:00.000-05:00

im making some feathers out of spraypaint.

July, 2009

2009-07-05T16:18:00.000-05:00

Well, I kind of had to say "enough!" with those other things, they weren't working, and I wasted too much time on them. But I am super pleased about this new painting I am working on! I think it is the only thing I've made so far this summer that's worth a damn.

painting updates

2009-06-15T21:07:00.000-05:00

Klaus

2009-06-15T20:57:00.000-05:00

Fox in the making

2009-06-11T18:20:00.000-05:00

A Cabinet of Curiosities

2009-06-11T12:11:00.000-05:00

Bibliodyssey, one of my absolute favorite blogs, just posted a collection of natural history drawings which need to be seen to be believed.

project snapshots

2009-06-02T16:52:00.001-05:00

A squirrel.

A skunk.

A frog and fish, very close to finished, I think.

Flowers.

A fox and a hare? I don't know.

Animal fight, a deer in there.

finished print

2009-06-02T16:48:00.001-05:00

Ive finally finished my print. The edition is all spoken for, but if you would like an artist's proof, I have a bunch. I will give you one in person, or else I will mail anybody one for like five bucks if you would like one!

proofs

2009-05-19T09:50:00.001-05:00

the first summer projects

2009-05-19T09:43:00.000-05:00

prints

2009-05-07T00:19:00.000-05:00

I am working on a print for the graduate print portfolio. I have two plates which I am working on, hopefully one of them will work out! These are the first proofs I have done.

frog painting

2009-05-04T15:05:00.001-05:00

This is a painting I am working on, I think it will be called Froggy Went A Courtin'.

new things

2009-05-04T15:02:00.000-05:00

I have a new apartment!

I have a new pair of glasses! I ordered them on eBay, and they came from china. I am not sure if I like them, though, I am afraid that they look a little too ridiculous, so I am not sure if I will get lenses put in them or not.

Skunk

2009-04-22T13:17:00.001-05:00

This is a painting of a skunk which I am tinkering with.