wiseman thesis final

!!!!!!!A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE

PACIFIC NORTHWEST COLLEGE OF ART !!

ZERO POINT: AN ARCHIVE ASSEMBLED FOR A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE VIRTUAL VISUAL ARCHIVE KNOWN AS B-PAINTINGS 1-9

(A USER’S GUIDE) !!

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS DEGREE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!Gary Wiseman

!!!!!!!!!!Approved by !!!!

______________________________________ Ellen Lesp r nce

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_______________________________________ Orleonok (Le nie) Pitkin

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Copyright © 2014 by Gary Wiseman All rights reserved

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!—To those who have disappeared

Annabelle and Gene !

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I believe that a work of art attempts to capture the universe... to be a microcosm or model. What the work of art conveys then is its own structure , its own design, which is an attempt to capture the design or larger rhythm of the universe as it "unfolds" in human consciousness. This is the meaning of artistic form now and in the past.

—Tom Marshall !!!Where did we ever get the strange idea that nature—as opposed to culture—is ahistorical and timeless? We are far too impressed by our own cleverness and self-consciousness. . . . We need to stop telling ourselves the same old anthropocentric bedtime stories.

—Steve Shaviro !!!one thing that’s been promoted endlessly in this world is the fantasy of understanding the notion that it is always possible desirable and costs nothing. 1

—David Antin

!The essay (the book) has a beginning, middle, and an end. There is an exposition, a development and a result. After that the idea (the system) is as clear and as well-defined as a dead butterfly in a collector’s box. But ideas, like butterflies, do not merely exist; they develop, they enter into relations with other ideas and they have effects . . . The end of an essay, or a book, though formulated as if it were an end, is therefore not really an end but a transition point that has received undue weight.

—Serkan Ozkaya

!My gosh, you invented painting.

—Lennie Pitkin

Unconventional formatting is found in Antin’s original manuscript. 1

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CONTENTS

!PREFACE: HOW TO USE THIS TEXT (NOTE TO THE READER) vii!A BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF THE STRATEGY AND TACTICS USED FOR THE PRODUCTION OF B-PAINTINGS 1-9 AND THE B-PAINTING ARCHIVE x!THESIS PROPOSAL xii!ABSTRACT xvi!EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 000 1

!EXHIBIT B: EXCERPT FROM THE AUTHOR’S JOURNAL 3

!EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 001 4

EXHIBIT D: DESTRUCTION 7

EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 002 9

!EXHIBIT C: MIDDLE STORIES 11


!EXHIBIT E: DISAPPEARING 24


!EXHIBIT F: ABSENCE AND SELF-DESIGN 32


!EXHIBIT G: INTRODUCTION (LOVE) 37

!EXHIBIT H: TRANSCRIPT (GORDON BARNES) 40

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!EXHIBIT I: ZERO POINTS 43


!EPILOGUE 46

!APPENDIX I: TEA PROJECT INDEX 47

!APPENDIX II: B-PAINTING INDEX 49

!APPENDIX III: B-PAINTING ARCHIVE 50

APPENDIX IV: TRANSCRIPT (FIRST STUDIO VISIT WITH LENNIE PITKIN) 51

!BIBLIOGRAPHY 54

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PREFACE: HOW TO USE THIS TEXT (NOTE TO THE READER) !!

Language resists what I am trying to accomplish. —Anonymous !

! Before reading further I request that you consider temporarily suspending your judge-

ment. I am not suggesting that you abandon your skeptical facilities altogether. On the contrary, 2

I encourage you to pay close attention to every detail and nuance in the following text. Before

you jump to any conclusions, however, allow your intuition the same amount of play that you

allow your skepticism. Above all, I beg your patience and trust.

No part of the following text is more or less important than any other part. Equal weight

is given to appendices, footnotes, text body, transcripts, glossary, preface, contents, epigraphs,

and so on. Each component contains information essential to the functionality of the whole text

which would be less if any part were omitted. There are certain redundancies present in the text.

This is intentional. You may feel confused at times, possibly betrayed, perhaps even misled. This

is not the case. When you feel uncertain, keep reading. Pay very close attention to your boredom.

If your mind wanders, you are most likely reading too fast. This text requires slowness. Only in

attending to the full course of the text will you allow yourself the possibility of the intended expe-

rience of it. The thesis of this text is, in part, your experience of it, which is why the thesis cannot

be spoken of directly—you haven’t read it yet. Some things can only be experienced. Some things

A strategy I employed in the development and production of the work this essay pertains to. 2

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are not what they seem to be. Language, for example, has ceased functioning with the same effi-

ciency that it once had. Rest assured, I have carefully considered you while constructing this text.

Insight rarely arrives all at once. Instead, insight unfolds over time in disparate forms and

in a disconnected, haphazard manner. If you are given to such things, consider treating this text

as a mystery in which each section presents further evidence for your consideration. At first

glance the evidence presented here may seem less than the sum of its parts—equal to zero—and

appear insufficient to illuminate any meaningful story whatsoever. If this is your assessment, you

may be correct. However, keep in mind that ambiguity often accompanies new accumulations of

information and that without ambiguity the possibility for discovery decreases. The meaning of a

body of evidence—or text—is, at the best of times, made as it unfolds in the mind of the one

who reads. This is a reflection of the experience of life itself which unfolds instant by instant in

the “darkness of the lived moment.” A detective takes into account the entire body of evidence 3

before her, finds the contiguous threads that run between disparate parts, accumulates clues,

draws a conclusion, makes her case. With this text conclusions are flexible—here zero can move.

Another way to approach this text—a method that also requires the interpretive faculties

of the reader—is as an archive. First, as an auxiliary archive containing literature pertaining to

the development and production of the B-Paintings Project and second, as an archive in the 4

process of cataloging itself. This text will resemble the structure of the body of work it seeks to

illuminate and will unfold in nine separate sections I have chosen to call exhibits. Each section

retrospectively informs, and is informed by, the strategy and tactics used in the production of B-

Paintings 1-9 and The B-Painting Archive.

Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nasser (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 161. 3

The first digital object of the B-Painting Archive was produced on July 26, 2011 7:57 PM and, unplanned by me, the 4

archive was for the most part completed 3 days shy of exactly 3 years later on July 23, 2014 at 12:25 PM. The final two images were delayed due to circumstances beyond my control and were completed on September 11, 2014 at 2:44 PM and October 6, 2014 at 4:26 PM respectively. See Appendix 2 for a comprehensive catalog of the B-Painting Archive.

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Finally, I would like to acknowledge the insight, support, and generosity of the following

individuals: Lennie Pitkin (my thesis mentor), Christine Toth, Dolly Lemelson and the Lemelson

Foundation, John Guenin, Filip Notredaeme, Gitti Salami, Gordon Barnes, Howard Silverman,

Kristin Bradshaw, Linda Kliewer, Linda Wysong, Mallory Pratt, Sarah Sentilles, Scott Pilzer,

Stephen Slappe, Victor Maldonado, and Wynde Dyer. This text would be far less without their

contributions and, in a few cases, even non-extant. My gratitude is immense.

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A BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF THE STRATEGY AND TACTICS USED FOR THE PRODUCTION OF B-PAINTINGS 1-9 AND THE B-PAINTING ARCHIVE ! !

B-Paintings emerged from the hand of G.Wiseman between July 26, 2011 and July 23, 2014 who used a systematic strategy for painting to generate images for the virtual visual archive. !Build 9 9″ x 9″ canvases. Paint images on them. Scan images. Repaint canvases. !Repeat process a total of nine times per canvas. Paint each canvas white. !Sub Strategy !Images emerge from experience (walking as research). Images emerge as a record of self/world awareness (moments of astonishment). Images appear abstract and are also figurative. !This strategy allowed a practice of physical art making that was not about the production of objects, rather the practice of painting and the thorough development, exploration, and exhaustion of an idea. !The first phase of the project, as outlined above, was designed to produce an abundance of imagery, like a storage battery, from which new work and experience eventually could be drawn. Each image object might be seen as words in a text or bits of information in a code. B-Painting Archive alludes to labor and the seemingly meaningless everyday ac-tions that accumulate over time and give form to a life.

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THESIS PROPOSAL 5

!Figure 1

Wiseman 1

Best Paintings 1-9: Gary Wiseman Thesis ProposalTa understand something fully can, at times, mean to lose everything again. lJnceftainty is oftenmost beautiful . . . lt rb possrble to destroy rather than assimilate one's object of enquiry throughpenetrating research, immersing it, or so I imagine, in night and invisibility, in &Jm, I wish to callmygelf happy whenever I store up an intuitian for myself, and have no desire to know any more.-RobeftWalser

The Dogon of Mali and the Lyela of Burkina Faso use fox or sand divination to formulate oracles bvinterpreting the tracks left by a fox on a grid drawn in the sand and marked with signs which repreientGod's wishes, lifu and death, regional harmony and peace, and the future of the village. The fox is luredto the grid by an ofiering of food. The ritual drawing takes place at sundown at the edge of the villagewhere the built environment and the unbuilt converge.

ln an age of limitless reproducibility art ceases to be a thing. lnstead, a specter of potential convivialitybecomes available offering aqsistiance to those who wish to conjure the sets of relationships centralto thebehavior that the impulse of art requires. Having truly crossed over from noun to verb, from materialobject back into its original function, art now roams through the world freely, inhabiting the negativerelationalspace between things, and mediating the migration of experience through cycles of eventb,memorie$, rehearsal; and reproduction.

Formythesisprojectlpropose BestPaintingsl-ganartdesignedspecifically fortheageof digitalreproduction that accepts the curent reality of limitless reproducibility and embraces the freedom thatcomes when art is liberated from expectations of objectification. Art has always been a prelinguisticexperiential process originating in the interiors of human beings-an impulse to respond to speclficelements in the external environment. This response stimulates behavior that often results in objects orartifacts that are not art in themselves, rather, memetic devices, the results of art or works of art Seen inthis light, art is granted the nimbleness of a flexible linguistic apparatus, inherently relational, experiential,and performative in nature.

As a displaced American Indian, directly-and adversely-affected by the genocidal policies of theprevailing European colonial system known as the U.S. government, I have intentionally appropriated thelanguage of geometric abstraction for representational-presentational-purposes. This is in keeping withprecolonialtraditions-epistemologies in which forms did not exist without meaning-albeit often hidden-and abstraction was not a consideration. European ideas of universalism, primitiMsm, purity of form, etc-concept$ foundational to abstraction-were superimposed upon the spoils of the colonial cache fromwhich modern art formed itself. I am on the lookout for ways to develop a potentially adaptive, balancedprotocolwith which to examine the miasma of subjective culturalconstruction, decolonization, andtranscultural identity.

Nimble Obiect Protocols (NOP) is an idea that emerged this semester as a conceptualtool-bearingresemblance to fox divination-for designing systems within which to work. NOPs are analyticalstructures designed to facilitate intuitive process within an intentionally limited field and are useful ingaining control over aftention, focusing intent, and facilitating the recognition, collection, organization and/or production of otherwise unseen objeets. NOPs are structurally adaptive, expanding and contracting asrequired to allow unexpected contingencies to be identified, absorbed, and utilized as a productiveresource. As vulnerability to collapse increases so does an NOP's ability to provide useful information.This process hinges on the tension between the integrity of the protocol and that which disrupts its goal.lnformation becomes available in the transitory space of the rupture.

Due to the fact that experience migrates immediately into memory as it occurs-taking up residence inthe physical space of the brain+xperience is recognized here as an object. Therefore, thoughts, stories,sense data, emotions, beliefs, and ideas are all granted object status, as is the entirety of the virtual world-files, data, codes, etc-anything that can be traced to a physical locale-no matter how minuscule. Allobject+-no matter size or context-are understood to contain within themselves the ability to impact the

Best Paintings 1-9 became B-Paintings 1-9 in reflection of the B-Side as found in recorded music. A commonly be5 -lieved misconception is that a B-Side is of inferior quality to the A-Side or the contents of the actual record. Rather than inferior, a B-Side frequently contains qualities that make it seem unique or atypical to an artist’s oeuvre. B-Sides don’t fit and often don’t conform to the listener’s expectations.

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! Figure 2

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Wseman 2

material realm in some way and, conversely, to be impacted by it. The actualization of this potential is lessimportant than the fact of it.

I will now establish a contextual framework for Best Paintings 1-9by discussing a pa$t body of work-TeaProject (2@6-2008)-and demonstrate the protocols I developed for establishing what I called co'relationalfietds of production. I refer to my work as co-relational, intentionally avoiding the term 'socialpractice'primarily due to the fact that I never abandoned formal aestheticst. On the contrary, Iaestheticized experience for the purposes of engagement. I will begin with two quotes that prefigure mymentality in 2005 when all of this was beginning:

"The world is full of obiecb, more or less intercsting; I do not wish to add any more."*DouglasHuebler*l do not mind objects, but I do not care to make them. The object-by virtue of being a uniquecommodity-becomes something that might make it impassible for peopleto seethe artforthefo rest." - Law tence W iener

I did not discover Huebler and Weners' re$pective statements until earlier this year (2014), however, I didcome to similar conclusions in 2005 at which time I ceased making art objects per se and refocused mycreative impulse towards designing co-relationalfields for the production of art experiencezthrough directinteraction and collaborative process-

$imuftaneously formal and informal, Tea PrajecF was the hub of my co-relational activities spanning twoyears and spawning 33 site-specific performance events+ in public space that ranged in size from threeparticipantss to three-hundrede. I settled on tea as a vehicle-a readymade, transnational, socialfacilitator. I chose transitional, underused, or overlooked sites within public space to frame the eventsz

1 Every object introduced into lhe o-relationat fietd-and the lield itself-was inlentional. I took into account formalqualities-color, composition, line, etc-in the same way lwould compose a drawing, painting or installation. Iremoved my hands from the wheel with the arrival of the participants.

2 | ameto think ot Tea Projec'tas a series of live cinematic evenUperformances-livirg movies or T.V. shows inpublic space.

a Tea Projectprovided a playful, experiential lens for observing the effects ol the rapid transformation of social life intosocial media at the dawn of the digiialage. lt was a lime in which interpersonal lelationships were becomingincteasingly commoditized, George W. Bush was in his second term, and civil liberties were being removed under theauspices of national security. ln my reasoning, using my creative impulse to increase direct conviviality and provideopportunities for people to have as much fun as possible in public space was the pinnacle of revolutionary action-insuch a cutext.

e See Appendix ltor a complete list otTea Proiect events listing'

5 Up on the Roof Tea Party. Tonnto, ON. 10n3/07.

6 Yellovt: Recess Tea Pprty 19W19A. PDX. Meriwether Lewis School A9/09 /07. (PlCATBAfest 07).

7 Site was imponad though attention was focused primarily upon that which occurred within its limits. The site wastreated as an additional actor, a character, with no more or less importance than other objects within the field despitediscrepancies in scale.

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! Figure 3

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Wseman 3

i.e. vacant lots, public transport, bridges-because I needed the sites to be as neutrally charged asPossible.s

The primary objective of Tea Prajectwas to populate public space and have as much fun as possible. Theprotocol tar Tea Project's operation follows. First, I chose a location, date, and time and set a theme tolend cohesion to the event. Second, I began to gather objects and resources: tea, food, props, costumes,sponsorship, etc- Third, invitations were issued-participants were encouraged to bring food to share andto dress in costume both according to stated theme. Fourth, was the preparation of the co-relationalfieldor set up. Fifth, the performance event occuned. These steps were repeated nine times per series.

Art work has frequently been used as a platform for rehearsing that which is possible whilst still immersedin what is. Tea Project employed this recursive function of art practice towards the development of aproactive model for generating social experience. The most compelling aspects of Tea Projectwerethemoments when disaster struck and the unexpected transpired. Thus, the Tea Projectmanifesto became:Celebrate disaster! Cooperate with the unexpectedl$ was breached-or failed

farthe events held within its frame, focusing attention, rendering them

real, even though ultimately a

The first thing that alerted me to the fact that I needed to transition out of the co-relational field was theemergence of "social Practice" MFA programs. The second thing was the "revolutionaq/'marketingtactics employed by the 2008 Obama campaign. Obama appropriated the language I used to do my work-a language of inclusion, optimism, engagement, and interactivity-for the purposes of making a bid forthe U.S. presidency-for power. By harnessing grassroots conviviality to such political maneuveringinevitably led to an environment of disillusionment and skepticism and ultimately*ironically*to the otherTea Pafi. All of this eroded the effectiveness of such strategies and rendered them useless for anythingbut the proliferation of cynical, "interactive" marketing campaigns that emerged in following years. Thethird transitional event was a more personal experience involving an unexpected encounter I had with AdFleihhardt's Black Paintings at the small gallery at the top of the Guggenheim in the summer of 2008.

Prior to this experience I thought little of painting. After ten minutes with the Black Paintings my notion ofwhat could be accomplished with the medium was radically shifted. I hadn't been in the room longer thanten minutes before I felt an intense sense of disequilibrium. I became nauseated and had to leavethinking I would be sick.

I began to research Reinhardt and discovered many concepfual alignments between he and lg. Reinhardthad devefoped a strict protocol of repetition and restraint for the generation of the Black Paintings notunlike the protocol I had established for Tea Project. Also like me, Reinhardt was also deeply suspiciousof the institutional art establishment and capitalism in general. One thing was clear-my experience ofReinhardt's work was untranslatable to a book or the Internet-whatever was powerful in a Black Paintingwas thoroughly embedded in the direct experience of it. One of Reinhardt's objectives was to create workthat was immune to reproduction*which demanded proximity-Reinhardt's painting'was inherentlyrelational.

I H is understood that true neutrality does not exist. Sites were chosen for the following reasons: 1) they werepregnant with possibilily due to the absence of significant human activity. 2) They were transitional in nature-highlyfluid, or 3) They had remained relatively static-aeording to my memory-over time. Urban development oftenoccurred soon after an event transpired. For example, a condominium now stands on the site of the secondRenegade Tea ParTy and a Planned Parenihood HQ on the site of the third.g Reinhardt is believed to have enabled the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism and eventuallyConceptualism.

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! Figure 4

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Wiseman 4

fn 2011 | combined strategies I had developed inlea Projectto facilitate co-relational fields with some ofthe ideas Reinhardt used for the production of the Black Paintingsto create a specific Nimble ObjectProtocolwith which to facilitate the operation of my return to thinking with my hands-to objects.

Best Paintings 1-9 uses the tradition of painting to simultaneously generate and document the experienceof physical art production as art. Best Paintings 1-9 is a performative site of self awareness and attentionto time that one knows about but not of. Best Paintings 1-9 is a process based system-a workingmetaphor with which to trace the migration of experience into memory and uncover possibilities for itsreturn to visibility. The digital objects of Eesf Paintings 7€-as well as the original objects from whichthey were extracted-are non aesthetic, therefore, it is possible to look through them directly into thesystem they exempliff, In other words, they mean exactly what they are and can't be known withoutengagement.

The name Best Paintings l'9came about after an amusing realization I had regarding the logic oflanguage. ln short, if I name a painting- The First Best Painting of 2011*it will be. This is true regardlessif my painting is judged to be sub standard-critics will still be required to refer to the work as lhe FirsfBest Painting af 2011. Best P t-9relationships that and belief. The similarities between the titles Besf

Paintingswere, of

With Besf Paintings 1€ I engage in the phy-sical process of painting without producing an overabundanceof objects-thereby sticking to my original ayersion. The process began when I built nine gu x 9o canvasesand limited myself to their surface area. After I had painted nine images I scanned each painted objectand image to create nine digitaf obiects which I archived.as digitat files. Following, t painted a new set ofimages on the original nine canvases which necessarily obliterated the previous images, This process willbe repeated nine times for each object. Completion of phase one will result in an archive of 81 digitalobjects. I am approximately two-thirds of the way through phase one of the project and intend to continueit over the summer and into ne)C semester.

Best Paintings 1-9 is an art designed specifically forthe age of digital reproduction that accepts thecurrent reality of limitless reproducibility and embraces the freedom that comes when art ceases to be athing and instead allowed to remain native to experience. The nine originalcanvasses of Besf Paintings7€ will not be shown as works of art per se but rather as artifacts-memetic devices-evidence of actualsites where art has transpired in the past. For exhibition the image plane of each originalcanvass will bepainted out white and hung accompanied by a contact sheet indexing the activities that have taken placeon the surface of the canvass. In this situation art remains dormant, only emerging in the viewer'sexperience as she absorbs the information provided and proceeds to project an image onto the emptypicture plane. Through visualization-and the process of arranging the given elements in her ownconsciousness according to her own experience-she draws conelations between them, becoming, in asense, the fox and the diviner'simultaneou$ly.

Best Paintings 1-9will exist first as a digital index-archive from which new objects can be produced asrequired. The possible physical forms these objects may assume-in keeping with limitless reproducibility-is presumably vast. Actualization of this potential is less important than the possibility of it-

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ABSTRACT !! My oeuvre is the culmination of three years of focused, speculative research into the

relationship between intuitive process and skepticism as it pertains to the formation, actualiza-

tion, recollection, expression, and transformation of personal experience. The subject of this

paper is both multivalent and continuously emerging and passing away, qualities that make it

nearly impossible to address in a direct manner. Therefore, an eclectic strategy has been used in

which a wide array of interrelated methodologies, metaphors, and images have been assembled

in the negative space surrounding the subject to gain some sense of its form. The subject itself is

present primarily through its absence.

The research presented was collected by observing and analyzing my own experience

through processes traditionally associated with the production of art such as photography, paint-

ing, and a variety of digital tools. Other strategies employed include, but were not limited to,

walking, writing, conversing, traveling, sleeping, observing, eating, reading, using the Internet,

visiting health professionals, and generally paying very close attention to the world around me. I

offer my research as an archive, allowing potential for an intersubjective experience for those

with time and curiosity, since the information revealed is slow and requires a mindful approach.

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ZERO POINT: AN ARCHIVE ASSEMBLED FOR A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE VIRTUAL VISUAL ARCHIVE KNOWN AS B-PAINTINGS 1-9 (A USER’S GUIDE) !!

This total immersion in visible invisibility is to be simultaneously seen and not known, registered and forgotten, revealed and concealed—a baptism of air—the community of clouds. !!

EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 000

!09/08/2014 !ON THE TOPIC OF THE END (AND CLOUDS). !008 (18:59) !L: You really seem to enjoy painting. What is that about? What do you think about the act of painting now? It’s what powers this thing. You set up this system, and it allowed you to paint pretty much anything you wanted without cre-ating a good painting or a bad painting by re-moving the judgement aspect of it. It’s a deli-cious freedom. But they are very carefully exe-cuted and contain a lot of elements that are, in a both historical and contemporary sense, the modes of making an image. There’s a geometric base that’s within it, there’s often a more or-ganic form that plays against it or occupies a similar space with it, and then there’s the ac-tion of reveal and conceal occurring. So, in some ways they are coded images and the im-ages can potentially have some narrative that is very coded. I don’t need to know the narrative, only that there is potential for one. So, these do have different kinds of subjects that get ex-plored. Not unlike the kind of babble in one’s mind where there isn’t necessarily a hierarchy.

I’m just thinking about stuff, looking at clouds or whatever. I see that happening, where im-ages form and change the way that clouds form and deform. Over all, I would say that your work tends to try and find some sort of harmo-nious balance. So what about that? I’m just looking at them as paintings. !009 (26:37) !G: Well. I do enjoy painting. I have been having a good time with it when I am settled enough and have a space to work. The longer the project has gone on, the harder it has become to obliterate the images. !L: I was going to ask you that. Are you afraid to paint them white? !G: I wouldn’t say I’m afraid. !L: You’ve been postponing it. !G: Yeah. I’m going to do it. But it is a signal for some kind of end and I have one more painting to paint. !!

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L: Is it the finality of it that is a little unnerving? !G: Yes, the structure I have set up is something I have been able to come back to consistently for three years. I suppose it’s the end of this very long process. Eliminating a structure—my life right now in general feels so unstructured, very precarious and up in the air. . . . !L: So, the structure itself has become a point of security for you? !G: I think it has become something that I have been able to come back to. There has been some sense of safety in it, yes. Because within that structure I can do anything, whatever I want within those limits. The last time we met, you spoke of the similarities between this work and Tea Project and some of my other [old] work. I had been considering that too, but the more time passes, the more I realize how similar they are. Incredibly similar. !L: So do you think—maybe you don’t want to answer—but you’ve got nine paintings and you’ve painted nine images on each one, so nine times nine. Do you think that’s a life span? !G: Painting my own life and death? Maybe when I paint the paintings white I’ll die! That could be good. !L: Well, do you think there is a certain death of the project? Everything after that becomes history. !G: You compared this project to writing a

novel. You write the novel and then it becomes all kinds of things after that that have little to do with the writing of it. !L: But that is also a potential for rebirth. Is that more frightening than the end? !G: Totally! Yes. Often it is. They’re the same thing really.

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EXHIBIT B: EXCERPT FROM THE AUTHOR’S JOURNAL !!

. . . !!I knew very little about Ad Reinhardt or his work when I encountered his black abstract paintings at the top of the Guggenheim in the summer of 2008. When I walked into the gallery that day the first thing I noticed was their absolute blackness. They were a formidable presence of negation and seemed like portals opening into a void: like peer-ing into the mouth of a cave or hovering at the edge of a singularity. The paintings were human in scale, windows into nothing or, perhaps, some-thing that was not visible, only felt, quiet, and yet deafening. They seemed to enfold us and enforce a hush in the room. I didn’t realize it at the time, but everything I thought was true about painting and art shifted that day. The longer I looked, the more I felt a sense of complete emptiness. But the emptiness was full of something indefinable, un-nameable, just out of reach. The longer I looked, the further I got from a sense of myself. It was a highly confusing and disorienting experience. Af-ter ten minutes I began to experience an intense feeling of disequilibrium. It was like falling in a dream and waking up with a start—but I couldn't wake up. I had to leave the gallery. I felt nauseated. I thought I would be sick.

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EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 001 !9/23/2014 !ON THE TOPIC OF BELIEF AND AMBIGUITY (PRIVILEGE AND INFORMATION). !File 032 (13:00) !L: It may not even be the importance of ambi-guity but the necessity and that’s a different way to think about it . . . because people don’t like it. !G: Sometimes I don’t like it. !L: It leaves us in a place where we doubt our-selves. We doubt why we are doing things. There’s no practical value in ambiguity is there? Yet, we need it. !G: That’s interesting. I agree with you, but I’m wondering what is the function of ambiguity? !L: I think it finds resonance in belief. Somehow it fits within that area and maybe words like hope or transcendence don’t have an equiva-lent in truth over here—I mean it’s not provable. !G: Transcendence? L: We have this whole collection of things that are ambiguous that we find some value in. How do I know that painting is real? I can see some tracery, but I don’t know if that first painting is really there or whether you mixed up the order of some of these things. I wouldn’t know. That’s where it starts to come in. Do I !

!believe something or do I not believe something? !G: So it has a relationship to skepticism? !L: Yes. !G: I’ve been thinking about skepticism as the converse of intuition. What do you think of that? !L: Hmm. !G: Like a counter or a foil. !L: I’ve never thought about that. It’s an inter-esting proposition . . . are they analogous? Do they sit side by side? Or are they more of a dialectic? !G: It doesn’t mean they can’t function at the same time. !L: Yeah. So an intuition says there’s a certain kind of rightness about this, and skepticism says “Why? Why do I think like that? Why do I trust that? I shouldn’t trust that.” So I guess that’s why we doubt our intuition, and then a lot of people at art school say, “trust your intu-ition.” What does that mean? It’s pretty flimsy. I can’t prove that. Why should I do that? Just go ahead and jump off this, you’re not going to get hurt . . . Um, I think I’m going to get hurt [laughs]. OK. So, somewhere in there is judge-ment. Maybe they’re both tools. !G: That sounds interesting. !

! ! � 5

L: Are these the tools to approach them? !G: Intuition and skepticism? !L: Yeah, or investigate them? Or to judge them? !G: Oh, like a criteria. !L: Yes. I don’t know. I have to think about that. !G: I think one of the primary threads that has run through this entire project is—I haven’t always used this language—the question of how to get skepticism [empiricism] and intu-ition to communicate or talk to each other and function as a criteria. For example, you said you’re an atheist and yet you have an interest in the African Bushman. The Bushman are heavily rooted in intuitive experience and what I would call spirituality, and they would talk about God in some form as central to their life and belief. So how do you navigate that? !L: Yeah. I’ve wondered about that myself and being an atheist, whether it’s a spiritual or po-litical position. Being very skeptical of religion and being an atheist are different, and being an atheist could be considered a religion. And—this is my own personal skepticism—how can I be an atheist and still have belief? !G: I guess that’s what I’m wondering. !L: Yeah. I feel terribly conflicted by that in a philosophical sense but not in actual daily practice [laughs]. So it’s curious, going back to how intuition and ambiguity work and how they can work in concert. I see it happening with so many of us that are artists with obses-sive compulsive personalities—this is what

keeps us out of jail—our ability to use these things in concert. It gives us the capacity to fo-cus and to direct. We have this binary system working: we have zeros and ones and they’re continually processing. We’re able to be both, to have the skepticism but also have this faith at the same time and it’s the dialog between the two. It’s not one or the other that is critical. In the same way it is critical to value ambigui-ty, you’re trying to trust the intuition but you know you shouldn’t because skepticism comes in and says, OK, I had this system like a check and balance but the dialog of that, pushing it forward, takes a certain kind of concentration, a certain kind of discipline, a certain innate set of dynamics that makes you want to do it. Be-cause there’s no other reason. There’s no logic in this. You can’t make someone be an artist—actually I think it’s sort of like a curse or some-thing. You end up here because you couldn’t go anywhere else. You had to be here, you just didn’t know it. You find this odd collection of people who become artists. They don’t come from one kind of group. They just start asking questions for no apparent reason. And they’re not even really looking for the answers. !File 033 (7:52) !G: I think that is one of the primary reasons, for me, of making art. I mean, for me, this [conversation] is it. !L: It’s fun for me too in the sense that it’s nice to know that other people are asking the same questions. !G: With Tea Project I ran into huge problems with documentation because it was really about being present in that moment and it had

! ! � 6

to do not just with visual aspects but what it smelled like and tasted like and the conversa-tion you had with whoever you ended up talk-ing to and what was on your body—all of these things are impossible to document. If there is an audience for this project perhaps it’s you. You have more of the experience, more of the information than anyone else. !L: I have privilege. I think the levels of partici-pation are interesting. It also is interesting that I’ve spent so much time. This time issue that’s involved in it is a different level of investment. The investment that you made in terms of the time, I don’t have that same level, but I proba-bly have more than any other person on this campus, yet, I don’t know if I could explain this more. . . . !Maybe we’re making a different piece of art through this. It becomes very privileged and only exists in this small frame. It’s really hard to put on the resume.

! ! � 7

EXHIBIT C: DESTRUCTION !!

To take something apart is to understand it—like tinkering with a machine or looking through an archive. Combining two or more things is an act of creation. Nothing stands still. !

—Hrag Vartanian . . .

!!

Sometimes things gain more clarity after they disappear. John Baldessari is probably

best known for Cremation Project, a single, creative act of destruction that took place on the 6

afternoon of Friday, July 24, 1970 in San Diego, California. Baldessari, “aided by friends and a

group of students from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), gathered up all his old

paintings made between the years 1953 and 1966, drove them to a local mortuary, and burned

them in the fires of a crematorium.” Afterwards, Baldessari gathered the ashes of his work and 7

put them into a burial urn, creating “one large breakthrough work out of a hundred or so small-

er ones.” This was essentially an act of extreme reduction, perhaps motivated by necessity as 8

It has recently come to my attention that artist Shoji Mukai, a member of the Gutai Art Association, made a similar 6

gesture a year earlier than Baldessari (1969) in Osaka, Japan. There is insufficient time or space for me to properly research and include this information in the body of the present document. Nonetheless, I feel it is important to make note of the information for it is a significant example of the Western grand narrative superseding a decentralized reality—something this paper seeks to question. Please see critic John Perreault’s article “Gutai: The First Happenings Were Japanese!” for more information about Gutai’s influence on post-war art and the subsequent politically motivated marginalization it endured. “The import of Gutai goes on and on,” writes Perreault, “Not only must we obliterate the master narrative, we must look at the situation that Gutai presaged: decentralized world culture.” : http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2013/03/gutai-center-stage.html. There was also a major exhi-bition at the Guggenheim Gutai: Splendid Playground” in 2013 that asserted the historical significance of Gutai.

“The Making of John Baldessari’s Cremation Project,” Yale Press Log, accessed September 29, 2014, http://blog.yup7 -net.org/2012/07/24/the-making-of-john-baldessaris-cremation-project/.

Ibid.8

! ! � 8

much as concept since Baldessari was scheduled to move from San Diego to Los Angeles after

taking these actions. 9

Artist Anne Johnson relayed a story to me from early in her career when her entire

body of work was destroyed by a flood. Retrospectively, she considers the flood to be one of the

most beneficial external events in her creative practice because it allowed her the space to re-

align herself with her work in the present. Whether intentional, in the case of Baldessari, or via

happenstance, with Johnson, the results are similar. From a place of transition and flux—we

could say from the middle—both artists, in lieu of an absent oeuvre went on to make new and

more sophisticated work. Their practices were clarified and propelled by absence, by disappear-

ance.

In his poetic novel Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje writes that the “right

ending is an open door you can’t see too far out of. It can mean exactly the opposite of what you

are thinking.” Baldessari’s Cremation stimulated the simultaneity of end and beginning, moti10 -

vating him to immediately start working again: “The next day [Baldessari] did a multi-photo

work called Equal Chicken Memories and wrote ‘39 Journal Entries,’ which listed thirty-nine po-

tential art pieces, including ‘put all the paintings in the world together as one large painting.’” 11

Baldessari’s act of destruction made space in his practice for new modes of production.

Ibid.9

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (New York: Norton, 1976), 94.10

“The Making of John Baldessari’s Cremation Project,” Yale Press Log, accessed September 29, 201411

! ! � 9

EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 002 !9/23/2014 !ON THE TOPIC OF THE MIDDLE, IMPERCEPTI-BILITY, PARTICIPATION. !File 028 (10:13) !L: I think you’re a good writer. !G: Oh, thanks. !L: I’m struck by two things. One is trying to describe the indescribable which we know is futile but important to do. The other is that it almost takes on the strategy of a mystery novel, and I thought that might be something to really make use of. I’m trying to think of this French novel which is a mystery story which goes on and at some point you find out you are looking for the letter E and it’s not used. So, I think 12

that what you’re doing is pretty good in talking around it because you can’t say it. This feels like the correct strategy to address this, the right sort of metaphor. !G: It’s a little bit . . . rough in places. !L: Don’t worry about that. Just keep going with it and seeing how it goes. !File 029 (09:49) !L: As far as the writing I would stick to the strategy of the Middle Stories. You are talking about how this doesn’t really need a viewer. It’s kind of interesting to think about that in

!!relation to, you know, you bring in Einstein, and I’m also thinking about cosmic noise and the idea that all this stuff exists out there but we may not be able to detect it, in the same way you’re [suggesting that] maybe our eyes are not the best tool and how this rhetorical question—if the tree falls in the forest and is not heard, the tree still falls in the forest. Does sound need reception in order for it to be a noise? Beta emission which is a cosmic noise is happening all the time. It’s just invisible. But we can use a Geiger counter, we can use an instrument to be able to pick that up. Does that allow us to know it any better? From our per-ception of it, if we had a Geiger counter and weren’t close to something emitting beta emis-sion, like uranium, it would appear to be ran-dom sound, yet if the sample were magnified by speeding up time it would become a pattern [laughs]. That is what your writing provoked me to think about, which is my own experience of studying physics and coming to the great conclusion that I knew nothing. !G: Yeah, that’s what I think. !L: There is all this stuff happening that is invis-ible to me and it just goes on. You’re really talk-ing about, how do I process that idea? Wow, I’ve just had an epiphany and the more I look at it . . . it’s gone. I can’t identify it. I can’t tell anybody about it because it’s an epiphany. So what do I do with that? So, the idea of the mys-tery novel seemed to be a really good metaphor.

Refers to, Georges Perec, A Void. London: Harvill, 1994. 12

! ! � 10

You know, here are nine paintings—81 paint-ings you cannot see [laughs]. !G: It’s becoming challenging actually. It’s be-coming almost as if they [the paintings] don’t exist. It’s becoming a challenge to remain present with the work. !L: Well, the only evidence of it existing now is your memory and your documentation. We know memory is faulty. In a way you are the mystery writer who is providing evidence. I like this whole idea of evidence, if I work with the mystery novel strategy. It’s a common experi-ence that people have had—reading a mystery novel—that might allow them a point of entry that a more philosophical writing might not. I think the philosophy of it is embedded in how you write it—the quotations you pull, the ref-erence points you pull, all the bibliographic material you pull. Yet, I think that you are cre-ating this abstract narrative at the same time and trying to bring this to some conclusion. This is a way of leading the audience to what-ever their conclusion is—which is the right conclusion. I don’t know if I’m talking in cir-cles, but I think we’re communicating . !G: Yeah, that’s what’s happening. !L: This writing, in a way, is a kind of archive and this archive has to have its registers or cues, so if it becomes artifact or if it becomes evidence, it gives me permission to be the de-tective. I think that is an interesting term—detective—because detective comes from detect and you’re asking people to detect and that’s the element of participation or performance that you’re asking from the audience. It’s start-

ing to form a shape. I think it’s terrific and I think it’s really right on the right path.

! ! � 11

EXHIBIT D: MIDDLE STORIES !!

The end of an essay, or a book, though formulated as if it were an end, is . . . not really an end but a transition point that has received undue weight.

Serkan Özkaya

. . .

!!

Stories are the “place” where humanity

“rehearses its fears” said literary agent, critic, 13

film producer, and educator Julian Friedman at a

recent TedX event in Ealing, England. He as-

sured all present that storytelling is more about

the audience than the writer or teller. The Aris-

totelian model still holds true for Friedman.

Aristotle believed that stories consist of three

basic elements: pity, fear, and catharsis—suffer-

ing, struggle, and overcoming—or, to bring it

closer to home, beginning, middle, and end. I

wish to tell a story that transcends time-cen-

tered traditions of narrative form and neutral-

izes the hierarchical—often market-driven—

relationships between subjects and objects. Be-

ginnings and endings are demoted in middle

The Mystery of Storytelling: Julian Friedmann at TEDxEaling, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al3-Kl4B13 -DUQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

! ! � 12

stories. The middle—what is happening now14

—is prime.

The story I want to tell is accessible

from anywhere at anytime by anyone. My story

is presently unfolding and is not contingent on

your attention. Despite its ubiquity, my story is

also impossible to tell because my story is actu-

ally your story.

Here are the facts: I really don’t want to

tell you a story at all. I do, however, wish to draw

your attention to the story you are engaged in

constructing for yourself—your life. If stories

exist solely as a site for humanity to rehearse its

fears, as Friedman suggests, I wish to carry this

argument to its conclusion and reallocate re-

sponsibility appropriately. I want you to tell your

own story. For my story of the middle, which is

your story, and your story, which is mine, are

intertwined and embedded within a multiva-

lence of what Einstein called world-lines. Every

person, place, or object has a world line that is

continuously being reasserted now in an endless

flow of ambiguous becoming. All are equally

valid, equally real, and completely unhinged

from dependence upon the four cardinal direc-

tions of earthbound existence.

Hierarchies are neutralized in middle

stories. As a result, middle stories tend to have a

Birth and death are recognized to represent an incontestable beginning and end within the parameters of human 14

physical existence.

! ! � 13

particularly fractious relationship to grand nar-

ratives and often reveal the inherent structural

precariousness within privileged historical tradi-

tions. Within a hegemonic system, middle sto-

ries often do not seem like stories at all, for they

do not easily fit into the predetermined struc-

tural limits that indicate what a story is. This

disconnect from dominant narratives allows

space for all manner of marginalia to emerge—

stories from the cracks. This includes non-hu-

man stories as well as the stories that emanate

from what bell hooks refers to as “the primacy

of [human] voices that are often silenced, cen-

sored, or marginalized.” Much of what hap15 -

pens has little to do with humanity directly and

is therefore disregarded or deemphasized. Much

of what happens within a society that does not

directly pertain to its dominant paradigm is

similarly ignored. However, when we ignore

such things—the middle—we do so to our own

detriment, for the middle is the origin of all

transformative possibilities. 16

The middle never ends or begins. It en-

compasses all beginnings and all endings since

the first beginning. The middle is experience

translated directly into memory as experience

unfolds. In this astounding operation, experi-

ence in the world is transformed into an actual

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 173.15

This point is discussed further in “EXHIBIT G: INTRODUCTION (LOVE)” and “EXHBIT I: ZERO POINTS.” 16

! ! � 14

object in the brain; there is a direct, traceable 17

correlation. While the object is hidden to unaid-

ed human vision and requires sensitive bio-

medical equipment to be perceived visually, this

object, active and alive, remains available to

memory through which it undergoes further

transformation each time it is recalled. Thus,

experience translates to biological object in an

unending migratory flow of consciousness. It is

nearly impossible to transmit accurate physical

representations of these memory objects back

into the world, nor is it necessary to do so. The

process of a memory object’s transformation is

its function.

!. . .

How does one tell a story with no be-

ginning or end? A creation myth will not do; 18

creation speaks of beginnings. A tragedy will not

do, for endings are colloquial to tragedy. A

hero’s tale is structurally wed to endings and

beginnings, both synonyms for the same event

of perpetual overcoming. In contrast, all actors

within middle stories are heroic and therefore

heroism is nullified as it is normalized. Each

agent, human or not, transitions and transforms

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought 17

(New York: Basic Books, 1999), 50.

Answer: Start in the middle. 18

! ! � 15

fluidly and can embody villain, assistant, master,

slave, pickle, monster, angel, god, trans, cis, the

devil, tramp, politician, wolf, saint, cup, moun-

tain, automobile, child, and so on. Everybody

wins and loses here all of the time. It seems a

mess and it makes very little sense to anyone.

We might begin to approach the middle

with the comedic. Laughter is always here,

laughter is now. However, even with the imme-

diacy of absurdity as our guide, humor is far too

narrow a field than is required by a middle story.

Comedy cannot exist without tragedy—a mid-

dle story contains the architecture of all stories

within its frame. A middle story is the narrative

equivalent of the convergence of space and time,

infinity—everything at once—and nothing.

The middle is in constant flux and can-

not be tracked, only experienced. Nonetheless,

billions of radical clusters of unseen events con-

tinue to unfold around us each second hidden in

plain sight. The remarkable fact is that we rarely

notice. This situation leads to a further reduc-

tion in already limited human perceptive abili-

ties and a decrease in the diversity of human

conceptual reserves—the lexicon (or substance)

with which we construct reality. Ultimately our

capacity for empathy is diminished (which is

defined here as the ability to imagine the experi-

ence of others: human, animal, plant or

beyond).

! ! � 16

It is by this route of the unseen that the

stories I wish to unleash pertain to an invisible

world, not in a spiritual sense but in the limits of

human perception. “Like the famous tree which

was unsure whether it would be making noise

should it fall to the ground in a forest without

people, there is a way of looking at things which

renders them performance” observed dancer

and choreographer Steve Paxton, a member of

the New York Judson Church Theater. Middle 19

stories have a lot to do with this performativity

of objects to which Paxton refers and thus calls

into question the privilege enjoyed by anthro-

pocentric paradigms. Philosopher Graham

Harman makes a parallel observation in his

book The Quadruple Object. “It might also seem

safe to assume,” Harman writes, “that the tril-

lions of entities in the cosmos engage in rela-

tions and duels even when no humans observe

them.” These relations and duels are precisely the

middle.

It is primarily due to our inability to

escape time that telling middle stories with ver-

bal language is improbable. To accomplish such

a feat requires nothing less than the articulation

of everything at once—not only improbable but

“Transcript from Movement 12 S Salon Evening with Steve Paxton in.” Docstoc.com. Accessed October 15, 2014. 19

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/29753076/Transcript-from-Movement-12-s-Salon-Evening-with-Steve-Paxton-in. Paxton believed that untrained dancers could contribute to dance form which led him to an interest in pedestrian movement. Paxton worked with and learned from Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Merce Cunningham and later developed the form of choreography that became known as Contact Improvisation.

! ! � 17

incomprehensible too! To do so would break

language’s ability to convey meaning for, as

Frances Daly writes in “The Zero Point,” an arti-

cle exploring the thought of Ernst Bloch, “signs

that occupy a not-yet exhausted past and an un-

certain becoming will be inherently unstable,

veering between creative possibility and con-

formity.” Similarly, the power to craft a middle 20

story increases in proportion to one’s ability to

traverse or, perhaps, transcend the unstable

veering of language while still managing to con-

duct a meaningful exchange. Therein lies the

primary paradox. The middle story becomes a

kind of anti-semiotics in which meaning is un-

hinged from signifier without disappearing

completely or terminating its relationship to the

signified. Through this process, tiny changes

occur in the world via the articulation and de-

scription of otherwise hidden, overlooked phe-

nomena. This practice produces possibilities for

new meanings and associations to occur, there-

by enriching human conceptual reserves and

increasing the lexicon we use to describe and

create reality. 21

Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek, eds. The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (SIC 8. 20

Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2013), 165.

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 9-10. 21

American philosopher Richard Rorty writes, “Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. . . . The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions.”

! ! � 18

. . .

! I have come to think of painting as a site

of performance and developed a way to allude to

middle stories within its structure. These paint-

ings, known as B-Paintings 1-9, are positioned

adjacent to life as opposed to occupying a cen-

tral, heroic position. They emanate from the

world of experience and operate as a unit, as bits

or components in a code —everything at once 22

and also nothing.

Contrary to popular theories regarding

the death of painting, pictorial problems don’t

go away but are constantly being produced and

must be attended to like doing the dishes or

washing clothes. There is no way to win the 23

game of painting once and for all because there

is no end to its questions. B-Paintings 1-9

emerged out of a disciplined structure or daily

practice similar to the rigorous practices Ad

Reinhardt employed to make his final Black

Paintings; however, no male modernist escape

fantasies were indulged. Nor were gestures made

toward an Oedipal break from the father and all

that came before. The B-Paintings Project did

not have a lofty goal of triumphing over, win-

ning, overcoming, finally completing, begin-

The Art of Jack Whitten, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQWwL02PI7o&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 22

Direct quote from Jack Whitten: “The end of all Modernist theory is the bit.”

“Afterall • Journal • Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It’s a Good Idea,” accessed Sep23 -tember 15, 2014. http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.12/why.are.conceptual.artists.painting.again.because.#cite2532.

! ! � 19

ning, or ending anything. B-Paintings 1-9 cele-

brates all preceding images and the power and

mystery contained within them. “The past is not

for living in,” writes John Berger in Ways of See-

ing, “it is a well of conclusions from which we

draw in order to act,” which brings to mind 24

Friedman’s concept of rehearsal. The B-Paintings

Project stands on the shoulders of the past,

draws conclusions from the well of all images,

remains in-between, and continues to quietly

ask questions. The evidence of a B-Painting’s

existence is revealed in its exposed edges and

the subtle topography of its concealed surface.

The edge of a B-Painting has accidentally be-

come an object, its surface has unexpectedly

become art. 25

!. . .

! Due to the fact that a painting inherent-

ly displays everything at once, I have begun to

suspect that the practice of painting is particu-

larly suited to the production of middle stories.

A painting slows down time and compresses it

into a space that may be returned to and re-

John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 26. 24

Please see “THESIS PROPOSAL” in the front matter. Page xv, fifth paragraph. “The nine original canvases of Best 25

Paintings 1-9 will not be shown as art per se but rather as artifacts—memetic devices—evidence of actual sites where art has transpired in the past.” Please see also “EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 003,” page 22, footnote 28.

! ! � 20

viewed repeatedly without limit. Each time a 26

painting is revisited, a potential for new mean-

ing to be discovered is available. John Berger

sums it up well: “In a painting all its elements

are there to be seen simultaneously. The specta-

tor may need time to examine each element of

the painting but whenever he reaches a conclu-

sion, the simultaneity of the whole painting is

there to reverse or qualify his conclusion. The

painting maintains its own authority.” 27

!. . .

!

Comics perform a similar operation. Please see August Lipp, “A Thought Experiment on the Lord’s Day” (BFA The26 -sis, PNCA, 2011), 1-7.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series.27

! ! � 21

EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 003 !10/03/2014 !ON THE TOPIC OF OBLITERATING THE EDGES. !File 041 (12:10) !G: I feel like this one, that doesn’t have much going on, feels less distracting. I’m not sure. I think I’m feeling that I want them [B-Paint-ings] to be hermetically sealed or something. !L: I understand the concern that you have. I’m also aware that without the evidence—there’s a certain part about the object nature of [these paintings] that is not reproducible. There is a history, but there’s a different experience in seeing these pieces in their actual form that is a different experience than looking at it through my iPhone and looking at the stages of it. Is that the story? Is that the narrative you want me to know? OK, that is secret information in some way, but do you also want me to look at that piece and say, “You know, there’s some evidence of this actually happening—I’m not having a mediated experience I’m having an actual experience.” By making these more anonymous, I might be removing the opportu-nity for that level of experience to occur. How much do you redact before you have nothing? Is nothingness the point? I guess for Plato the question might be, is it important to approach the archetypical or to be it? Because I don’t think it’s attainable. That’s why it’s an arche-type. That would be like in some ways trying to prove God. So, it is some evidence that helps support belief in a way. You’re talking about walking down the street and something ordi-nary suddenly presents itself in such a way that

!there’s some kind of experience that’s out of the ordinary and all I can do now is tell you about it. I can show you the circumstance that it oc-curred within, but you’re going to have to be-lieve me. How do I know you? And why should I care? Well, this is one way I know you—by the edges—that maybe there is some truth in this. !G: It’s remarkable what’s occurring. The edge and the surface feel like two different things. They feel like they are getting farther apart. Does that make sense? It’s really strange. !L: Tell me about that. !G: I keep putting layers of white paint on them because I feel like it’s not covering sufficiently. It hasn’t gotten to the point where I want it to be. But the surface is getting flatter and flatter. In my mind they already were flat but some-how they have become more flat and, in that flattening, the edges are becoming objects and almost extending out. !L: I see. You are talking about the contrast that’s beginning to occur. The more the evi-dence of something happening on the surface is removed, the more apparent the edges become. !G: It’s like the surface is imploding or some-thing. !L: It also questions whether or not total erasure is ever possible. Which presents interesting ideas of entropy or the idea of, as you men-tioned before, the storage battery. Now I’ve put

! ! � 22

this kind of energy into this object. There’s a lot of decisions that went on here. !G: Which is very interesting. That charge, whatever it is, is what I was drawn to in the Ad Reinhardt work. The stuff that emerges from it as you are present with it. !L: Well, there’s that investment by the artist but now that investment is being transferred to you, so, OK, Reinhardt’s really working off of perceptual strategy and he’s really reduced things down and set up this framework that’s very much about geometry, which is very much about an intellectual proposition. Here’s the framework: within that—we can divide things up into squares, into grids—we’re not giving any kind of emotive content necessarily. It’s an intellectual engagement—and he’s trying to reduce connotation—he doesn’t want you see-ing stuff that’s not intended. So, by setting up that framework, the strategy within it, it’s go-ing to require you to invest into the piece. His personal tactics then have been to essentially control your experience. In the same sense you’re controlling that experience by what you’re allowing us to see or not see. !G: What is surprising me though is that I think these paintings are actually starting to do that. I don’t know if I really intended that. I was in-terested in it and it is what I was thinking about when I was making them, but I didn’t know. !L: You hadn’t experienced it as the creator. !G: I didn’t know that these were going to be-have in a similar way to Reinhardt’s work. I

thought they were just kind of peripheral things, props or something. 28

!L: Do you think Reinhardt knew exactly what experience that the audience was going to have, or is he just creating the potential? So, is it in-tended or not? Intentional or not intentional? !File 042 (7:59) !L: In this experiment, are you forcing the an-swer instead of saying, “Oh, I’m observing this reaction. OK, now let me think about that. I didn’t intend that this occurred, but suddenly this is happening. How do I work with it?” !G: It’s a little unnerving actually. I mean it’s kind of cool, but. . . . !L: Why is it unnerving? !G: I don’t know. !L: That suggests a control issue. !G: [laughs] I guess I just wasn’t expecting it. It’s cool. I’m into it. !L: I think that is why I wouldn’t paint the edges if it were my decision, but I can understand why you would make a totally different deci-sion about it. It can be a very intentional move. I like the fact that if I look head on to this piece I see one thing but if I see this in a corner in-stallation, or walk around it, it’s maybe more effective than seeing it on one continuous wall. There’s something about mirroring and that it’s an odd number—you can’t make it equal with nine. I could even see it being three and six. I

Please see “THESIS PROPOSAL” in the front matter. Page xv, fifth paragraph. See also page 19, footnote 25.28

! ! � 23

can see the potential of really working with the negative in-between the two having almost a different significance. The way we would look at a Don Judd work or look at a series of ob-jects placed in a certain kind of rhythm, or to break rhythm, or that there is a level of experi-ence here that might be more than the simple intellectual proposition. !G: That’s something that I’ve been thinking about. I like writing and reading, but it feels like words are functioning less and less. !L: You’re starting to get to the point where you’re having a non verbal relationship with these pieces. I don’t think you can express in a verbal way the kind of thing that you might see in the ordinary, or the pedestrian, that might be a striking experience. So, maybe they’re all the same. I think the irony of this whole project is actually discovering the power of the image. !G: That’s probably true. !L: I don’t think you really gave a fig about painting when you started to paint. It was just part of the strategy and you were trying to make it as neutral as possible by using the square, reducing all of these things, and sud-denly they’re talking back to you! Whereas you had all this control before and now something else is happening that is unanticipated. Re-member we were talking about the mystery of looking for the letter E? Maybe the mystery in this is looking for a painting. How ironic would that be?

! ! � 24

EXHIBIT E: DISAPPEARING !!

But the aura of the original never disappeared and each copy made the source more desirable. !

Hrag Vartanian !!

. . .

!!

Theorist and critic Stephen Wright describes another, more contemporary form of dis-

appearance in art—the absence of art as such. In an article published on the Art&Research web-

site, Wright suggests that some art is “moving toward its own ‘invisibilisation’ in its quest to 29

elude” forces; he refers to such forces as “curatorial police” that would seek to censor or con-

strain art’s activities. Wright insists that art can be a “competence” as opposed to a “perfor-

mance” and that the critical, dissensual characteristics of art increase when it transcends its own

aesthetic expectations or “normative constraints.” In Wright’s words,

!!Fortunately, a growing number of artists and artists collectives are questioning the need for art to conform to . . . normative constraints . . . favoring an art which remains open and process-based, showing scant concern for the usual criteria of showing and dissem-inating, refusing to subordinate process to any extrinsic finished product . . . Envisaging an art without artwork, without authorship and without spectatorship has an immediate consequence: art ceases to be visible as such . . . if it is not visible, art eludes all control,

“Art & Research : Art Visible and Invisible,” accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/29

wright.html.

! ! � 25

prescription and regulation . . . all “police” . . . one might argue that the key issue in policing art is the question of visibility. 30

!! This is to say, according to Wright, we have art making itself invisible in order to be-

come more effective in the world. If art is visible, it is also subject to ‘Spectacle’ and available to

be appropriated for all manner of activities contrary to the original intent of the artist, such as a

marketing campaign or the furthering of a contrasting political agenda. This is a curious and

befuddling world for an artist. When visual artists willingly choose to cease visual production as

a strategy, it magnifies the inherent peculiarities and dire circumstances that cause such a base-

line flip.

Concluding his essay with a single example of art working towards its own invisibiliza-

tion as a method to elude the police “artistic and otherwise,” Wright cites the eight-member 31

Argentinian art collective Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC, or Street Art Group). GAC creates

unofficial street signage that presents information pertaining to atrocities committed by the

former military dictatorship of Argentina. The GAC’s signage draws “attention to the ongoing

presence in Buenos Aires’ residential neighborhoods of those who, in one capacity or another,

took part in the criminal activities” that led to the deaths of 30,000 people. The GAC produced 32

a “full array of tools,” among them street signs “indicating the location of clandestine detention

centers” as well as “city maps showing the addresses of the perpetrators of repression.” The 33

“Art & Research : Art Visible and Invisible,” accessed October 1, 2014. 30

By this Wright means 1) the metaphorical curatorial police of the artistic establishment who determine what is and 31

isn’t art and 2) the actual institution—The Police—granted the authority to uphold civil law and order in a society often through violent means and in violation of the laws and liberties they are entrusted to protect.

Ibid.32

Ibid. 33

! ! � 26

GAC does not seek personal retribution through its activities, but instead aims to show how the

dictatorship functioned so as to prevent its reemergence. “What they do,” observes Wright,

“is not art, yet without art it would not be possible to do it. This paradox underscores an ethical imperative: how could art adequately reconcile form and content to represent the absence of the 30,000 people assassinated by Argentina’s military regime some decades ago, for it is not their presence which is absent, but their absence which is so devastat-ingly present.” 34

! The idea of an absence that is devastatingly present will be revisited again in Exhibit F.

“Art & Research : Art Visible and Invisible,” accessed October 1, 2014. 34

! ! � 27


!10/07/2014 !ON THE TOPIC OF REVEALING OR CONCEALING THE DIGITAL PRINT OF THE B-PAINTING ARCHIVE (VALUE, EXCHANGE, AND INVENTING PAINTING). !File 043 (8:48) !L: We are looking at [the digital print of the B-Painting Archive] serially as a sequence. Did 35

this painting have to come before this one, and so on. What are some of the observations that you have? You said that some of the images jumped out or moved around? !G: I still feel very close to it. I feel like I want a bit of distance. What’s your reaction? !L: There are a couple of observations. One is the very simple observation of the importance of geometry or straight lines, what we’ll call an idealized shape versus some things that are more organic. The triangle is an archetypal form, the square is an archetypal form, the cir-cle is an archetypal form. Then these begin to become various combinations and manifesta-tions of them. There’s also things that are remi-niscent of signs and symbols like a stop sign. Maybe some of these are signs for things I don’t know. I’m conscious of this disconnect between signifiers and what is being signified, and some I can accept on this level and not on another level where it becomes a bit more cryptic. Some of them begin to play off a certain geometry of perspective: diagonal, architectural elements.

There are categories starting to form. The cate-gories may be grids or potentially games or !patterns or playing fields. I’m also seeing them with this grey background behind all of them, which does change them to some degree and it almost makes them look like little objects that I can move around. Also, I would look at these and say this particular artist has put together this group of reproductions without regard for a discernible hierarchy. If I read from left to right according to the Western tradition, I would still have no clue which image was actu-ally related to another. Some of them become clearly relational, some seem to be a totally different animal. I’m curious if you, in viewing these and having that privilege of making them—carefully making them—if we are seeing the same thing. !G: You and I? Yeah, that’s impossible to tell really. !L: I’m curious how memory informs you in these pieces. !G: That’s what I meant when I said I wanted distance from them, because there are so many associations with almost all of them. I remem-ber where I was and what was happening. !L: So, the images may carry a certain symbol-ism for you that might be a result of personal motivation or personal narrative. !!

Please see “APPENDIX III,” page 50.35

! ! � 28

File 043b (11:41) !L: Do you put any value judgement on these as you look at them? !G: Value judgement? !L: We were talking about this in relation to removal of judgement. I’m curious, since it is different now, and you are one step removed from the making, and have all of the images in front of you, if you think some of the images are more interesting than others, for example. !G: I definitely have favorites. Some resonate above others. I have favorite groups and have evaluated them on that level. To some degree, they all feel equally important even though there are certain things that I am drawn to more than others or think some are more suc-cessful than others. It feels like this is complete as a collection and they each support the other. If I were to take one away, it would be dimin-ished. Last week I mentioned that I am starting to question the privileging of moments of as-tonishment. Why do I prefer one moment over another? I think that is starting to follow through here. I’m also questioning [myself]. You and I had more conversations about con-cealing and revealing, and I have been asking myself “why?” Why am I withholding this from the world? What happens when I do this? If I just release it, what occurs? What is going to assist in communicating? Is that important? Is it more important to keep my cards close? I’m asking a lot of questions. !L: I think the question is interesting in that it presents us with two polar views. A lot of the dialog we’ve had has been about these polar

views and contradictory forms—paradox. See-ing those forms is almost like a dialectic. One needs the other to exist. Semiotics: you need the sign and what is being signified to line up. One thing to think about: if this were 81 paintings [indicates the print] and then I saw these [indi-cates B-Paintings 1-9] I would say, “These are the same.” One is the withholding of the infor-mation, the other is presenting so much infor-mation it’s impossible to comprehend. Both obfuscate but in different ways. !G: That is very true. That’s helpful. !L: As we talked about these [the print] we’ve noted certain characteristics but the sheer number of them makes them kind of meaningless. !G: This print is everything at once. Literally, I guess. !L: One way to look at the value of this is to lo-cate it as a ritual process that would not be dis-similar to what you did with Tea Project. What was important in that is not available to every-body. It may not even be available to the people who try to access it this way or that way. Then would that be a totally futile effort? In part of your writing you say that the work doesn’t need an audience to exist, so, why exhibit it? Just following that line of thought. !G: Totally. It doesn’t need an audience. Neither does a mountain, but when you encounter a mountain, it’s memorable. !L: So, do you need an audience? !G: Well, I don’t know, but if I have one. . . .

! ! � 29

!L: Do you want one? !G: I have ambivalence about that, but. . . . !L: Do you want to communicate? !G: Yes. I was going to say that if there is an audience, then I want to communicate. If there are people willing to engage, then I do want to reciprocate. !L: That’s very important because now we are talking about an exchange. Saying that the art can exist without an audience might be a statement of fact, but it’s not a statement of exchange. So it seems like exchange has some value in your work. You are putting some value on it as a means of exchange. !G: I’m not entirely sure what’s being exchanged. !L: Well, that does seem to be the next question. I think that has to do with defining exchange. What is being exchanged and maybe it isn't what you’re offering, but what is the audience offering you? ![long pause] !G: That’s an interesting question. !L: And very complicated. !G: Then it comes down to what do I want or need. !L: It could be that. !

!File 044 (11:58) !G: I don’t know. !L: I don’t either. I think an exchange can take place with intangibles. I think there’s a role probably that the audience plays whether you’re there or not. !G: There’s a completion, or activation, if we are speaking in terms of receptivity. !L: Expand upon that. !G: There has to be a willingness to engage, to be open to an exchange. It doesn’t just happen. !L: So what if we look at Descartes saying that the fact that you think is proof of your own ex-istence. Is an audience proof of your existence? !G: Ah, right, I see. Acknowledging my thinking? !L: Well, you thought, therefore you are. Or have been at one time. There’s that idea of ex-change as creating validation of something existing. !G: I think validation is certainly a thing—there’s a difference between a monolog and a discourse. !L: It’s just possible that in the same way we think of this as being—without some sort of clues—at the very best rather minimal art, and if we look closely enough, we know that some kind of event has occurred here and it wasn’t just painting the edges and there was probably something there that I can’t see. In another

! ! � 30

way, with the proper keys, the work is totally understandable. I’m looking at this white thing and I’m wondering, “what’s the secret?” Well, here’s the secret [indicates print]. This is what it is. So, in that sense, it is totally understand-able if they have some awareness of the process. How they evaluate it—whatever—but they know that something went on here and they’re looking at that; they are no longer seeing a white canvas. One of painting’s unique values is its ability to slow information down so that with repeated viewing there is repeated under-standing. Maybe it isn’t a universal under-standing, but there is a kind of personal under-standing, a personal awareness. We can go back to the Reinhardt or we can go to a Robert Ryman, that will be something quite different. You have the capacity to allow the viewer that privilege, but it takes an active participation on their part to engage. I think that is getting down into the value stuff now. You are setting up this iPhone application that does give them [the viewer] a way of actually being a perfor-mative part. You’ve obfuscated it, but you have all the clues here and you have the ability for anybody to begin to unravel this. !G: If I have the canvases up on one wall and the print on the opposite wall—I like that paradoxical element you spoke of—they are performing the same operation in different ways, and they are having a conversation about it. But if you are looking at the print over here, I can imagine [the viewer] wanting to take the print over there and look at the can-vases with the print as a reference. If I keep them separate, there will be this bouncing back and forth in the mind of the viewer, which is close to my original intent. 36

L: Then what you are doing is like in a film where it requires a certain memory of what proceeded it. It is not linear, it provides a differ-ent level of sequence. So, there’s enormous clues and these things become evidence of what oc-curred. I think in that way you are really ac-knowledging the act of painting as having some value. !G: Yeah. Damn. [laughs] !L: That’s why I think the more you were en-gaged in the project, the more they became about paintings and it uses or needs a history of painting. I don’t think it could be anything other than painting at this point. !G: Well, I was standing on a foundation of painting without even really realizing it, which is, perhaps, what you are implying. I began to realize it when I started to research Reinhardt because that is what he felt he was doing—completing painting—which is a funny notion. Especially retrospectively. I read one account that suggested that an ending is a beginning and he was sort of wrapping it up so new things could happen such as Conceptual Art or Min-imalism. I would tend to think more along those lines. Regardless, he was taking into ac-count the entire history of Western art—that was his intention and pretty much what I was standing upon—not to mention everything that came before the Western tradition or parallel to it. !L: Yes, you needed all the work that proceeded it, whether it was actually called art or not. It was the whole idea of making an image. That’s why the image itself wasn’t as important as the

Please see “Thesis Proposal” in the front matter. Page xv, fifth paragraph. 36

! ! � 31

history of the image. My gosh, you invented painting [laughs]. !

! ! � 32

EXHIBIT F: ABSENCE AND SELF-DESIGN !!!All art and objects are becoming conceptual. This reality has made us all faith-based beings, even non-theists. Our world is based upon abstractions that we mutually agree upon and trade. !

—Hrag Vartanian !!

. . .

!! Curated personas are not people. This is an odd development; the absence of absence

has allegedly offered humanity the opportunity of full, unrestricted presence in the world, and

yet humanity has chosen to remain concealed, restrained. Presumably ashamed of its naked

vulnerability and natural condition, humanity recedes into a familiar paradigm of restriction,

where the implied personal responsibility suggested by self-design emerges as a foil for the for-

mer regulatory function of God. It is difficult to remain fully present with ourselves or others

under these conditions. We have entered a house of mirrors.

Twentieth-century French classicist and philosopher Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and

Grace, that “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.” Much later, Boris 37

Groys delivered a lecture at the Frieze Art Fair in London. “Following the death of God,” Groys

said, “the conspiracy theory became the only surviving form of . . . discourse about the hidden

Simone Weil, Waiting for God: Transl. by Emma Craufurd. (New York, 1951). Quoted in Anne Carson, Decreation 37

(New York: Random House, 2005), 178.

! ! � 33

and the invisible; [where] we once had nature and God, we now have design and conspiracy.” I 38

mean to cite an additional pair of absences. The first is the absence of nature—the notion of the

“true” self. The second, referring to God, and taken in the light of Weil’s statement above,

equates to the absence of absence itself. In this scenario, faith, to exist, requires the presence of

an absence. Without this fundamental absence, according to Groys, we project our fear and un-

certainty through the lens of paranoia onto the screen of conspiracy. We tell ourselves such stories

to rehearse our fears. Design has taken the place of nature, and conspiracy has assumed the seat

of God.

Groys later says that “every kind of design—including self-design—is primarily regard-

ed not as a way to reveal things, but as a way to hide them.” In this statement Groys suggests a 39

world in which it is impossible to disappear, a world in which “everyone is subjected to an aes-

thetic evaluation—everyone is required to take aesthetic responsibility for his or her appearance

in the world, for his or her self-design. . . . Not everyone produces artworks,” writes Groys, but

“everyone is an artwork.” In this world, humanity assumes the creative role formerly held by 40

divinity (through its absence). In so doing, humanity ensures its own partial disappearance

through acts of self-creation (design). A designed self can never represent full presence even if it

is presented as such. A designed self is a simulation of a self. God can only be present in creation

under the form of absence. Likewise, humanity can only be present in the world—a designed

space—after the absence of absence, by facilitating its own absence. The absence of humanity is

a process initiated by self-design.

Boris Groys, “Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility | E-Flux,” accessed October 1, 2014. http://www.e-flux.com/38

journal/self-design-and-aesthetic-responsibility/.

Boris Groys, “Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility | E-Flux,” accessed October 1, 2014.39

Ibid.40

! ! � 34

Every kind of design—including self-design—is primarily regarded not as a way to reveal

things, but as a way to hide them. In this new world of self-design, I am required to express my-

self in order to hide myself. It is my responsibility to remain visible yet concealed: to share, to

like, to collect as many friends as possible, and, increasingly, my value is assessed solely on the

state of my virtual networks. My efforts towards personal expression, however, are ultimately 41

deemphasized as they are interchangeable: expendable commodities that network administra-

tors commonly refer to merely as “content.” I must willingly operate within designated parame-

ters to construct my content—my identity—using network tools that are developed for this

purpose. I have little choice in the matter beyond the opportunity to select among that which

has been prepared and designed for my consumption.

Inaction and silence equate to resistance in this case, and Stephen Wright’s impulse to-

ward anonymity and invisibilization becomes more clear. However, to remain silent is to choose

a kind of death, for it has become abundantly clear that if a person, object, or event is not repre-

sented online, it doesn't exist—it is invisible, hidden; and yet, it does still exist. The Internet is an

ambiguous middle space with no end and no beginning. It is all happening now in myriad lo-

cales. If one were to write an accurate history of the Internet, it could only ever be everything at

once—a middle story of irresolution and precariousness that is life in the present tense.

!

The Jay Block career coaching website reads: “Take massive action and master a few key skills–such as building your 41

own personal sales force (formally known as networking).” Here networking and “friends” are conflated with commerce and job seeking. Presumably this has always been the case?

! ! � 35


09/08/2014 !ON THE TOPIC OF LOVE AND DEAD ENDS (DURING AND AFTER). !008 (18:59) !G: I realized the other day that the core of my practice comes from this desire to communi-cate, and it comes from this place of love—for lack of a better word—this desire or impulse to expand or generate or flow. And so I’ve been thinking about that a lot, especially in terms of how it relates to PNCA, because I think that a lot of institutional structures like PNCA are antagonistic to that process in some way. Well, in a lot of ways. Because that impulse and that response requires a lot of space and time that school just doesn’t afford, because there is so much stuff you have to do. !L: It’s a certain discipline that you’re [begin-ning] to talk about. Agnes Martin in particular talks about the idea of transcendence. The works glow. It’s bigger than their parts, and I think that comes from a very internal spot. Have you ever read some of the writings of Agnes Martin? !G: Yeah, a little bit. !L: She’s kind of goofy sometimes. !G: Yeah, she goes a bit over the top in places. !L: It’s New Mexico. !G: The project is also very related to the condi-tion or state of art now, or images now. The

proliferation of images. What Tuymans refers to as the abundance of imagery and poverty of experience. The destruction of images, the ex-pansion of them, the endless ability to repro-duce them. It hasn’t necessarily taken away from their power as Benjamin suggested it might [it may have increased it], but it has changed something. There’s grief in it because it does feel that things are changing so fast. There’s loss. . . . !045 (10:23) !L: Some people said, and not in a pejorative sense, that Reinhardt took it to a dead end. To follow that line of reasoning, you couldn’t go past that point. Do you think of this as a dead end? You can’t do this project again. !G: Totally. I would agree with that statement. I don’t know if I would agree with the statement about Reinhardt. What he did was take it to the point of experience. Perhaps he took it to a cul-de-sac or a dead end so you could go there, have an experience, and leave. You could visit a ritual space. That was my experience of the Black Paintings when I saw them. I entered into how I think about ritual space—I haven’t thought about it in this way until now—but in Tea Project that’s what I was doing. I was cre-ating these adjacent space-times that people could enter into and something occurs, then you leave, you take it with you. !L: Reinhardt’s piece really brought a critical awareness to the experience, the actual physi-cal experience of engaging the work. Reinhardt removed a lot of the clutter. Things got very, very basic.

! ! � 36

G: This is the experience. !L: Out of that came other perceptual works. You can’t make those Black Paintings again. Reinhardt could only make iterations of them. At the same time, people took that idea and that’s why in media ecology some people say that the idea of an installation is an expanded painting. Because then it’s a three-dimensional experience. !G: Well, even performances—I thought about Tea Project with the same intentionality as I think about drawings and paintings. It’s a lot easier this way [laughs]. !L: Fewer variables. The question now is how do you construct the idea? I’m thinking about frameworks and strategies and tactics again and its role in your particular art making which can be applied to other areas of critical inquiry. Let’s say you set up this grid, and within this grid all the variables just become different ways of arranging things. The grid accepts all of this and then this grid has a cer-tain set of parameters or rules [such as] I’m not going to judge this. I’m going to put together these ingredients and what happens is what happens. So, I have this grid, this framework, and this is a conceptual framework because now I can employ a variety of strategies to acti-vate it. In this particular strategy, you used painting but the tactics of it were about record-ing and now it’s about the various forms the archive can assume. So really, your strategy was about creating this archive of which only you had access and the tactics became how you reveal the archive. So, even in Tea Project you had that structure and you put these things together—external events or situations,

personal relations. All of these things become part of the dynamics that is centered around a common experience that people are having, so there are fixed, variable elements involved and the result is an experience that only those peo-ple know about. You’re the only one that knows about what happened at all of the events. Again, you are the one that is in control of the archive, and how you begin to use the archive is to try to create another level of experience. So in this, it comes after the fact, and in Tea Project it came during the fact. !

! ! � 37

EXHIBIT G: INTRODUCTION (LOVE) !!

[T]he formation of speech acts produces effects which can give shape to the world.

—Serkan Özkaya

. . .

!!

The thing I care about most is love. Curiously, love is one of the things for which I have

the least insight. Don’t worry, this text will not be about love directly, and it is definitely not

about the exhausted linguistic device you most likely hold in your mind as you read this. The

word we once recognized as love in the English language no longer exists as such. Love has been

kidnapped and forcibly converted into—L—O—V—E—. There is always something prior to 42

or beyond what we presume to know. Everything has a context, of course, and love is no differ-

ent. Love before—L—O—V—E—had to do with regenerative processes, creation, growth, and

the unending expansion of the cosmos. Conversely, love before—L—O—V—E—also encom-

passed darker phenomena such as decay, destruction, labor, ferment, and disappearance. Both

instances feature shifting states and change. Whether constructive, as seen in the first instance,

or entropic, as seen in the second, both processes fall under the category of transformation.

“The talent for transformation,” writes Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, “has given

[humans] so much power over all other creatures [and] has as yet scarcely been considered or

begun to be understood.” Canetti implies that humans occupy a privileged position in the world,

Unfortunately, this over burdened linguistic device is all I have to work with presently. On a side note, it is also clear 42

that both—G—O—D—and—F—R—I—E—N—D—have met similar fates.

! ! � 38

born, as they are, with the potential to transform at will. “Everyone possesses [the ability to

transform], uses it and takes it for granted,” Canetti writes, “few are aware that to it they owe

what is best in themselves.” Transformation, specifically as it pertains to humans, involves ex43 -

panding beyond self-limitation, societal regulation, or institutional capture, and embodying

something else. Few are aware that to it they owe what is best in themselves, Canetti reminds us,

implying that to be fully awake as a human being—to be fully human—is to recognize that the

body and the mind are in flux and can be intentionally redirected toward new configurations.

Later, in his treatise on transformation, Canetti provides an illustration for what he calls circular

flight transformations by using the Greek myth of Proteus. I quote him here at length:

!!Proteus, the wise Old Man of the Sea, is the master of the seals and, like them, comes once a day to dry land. First the seals come, then Proteus. He counts them all carefully, for they are his herd, and then lies down among them to sleep. Menelaus, on his way home from Troy, has been driven off his course by adverse winds and cast with his com-panions on the coast of Egypt where Proteus lives . . . Proteus’ daughter takes pity on [Menelaus] and tells him what he must do to seize her father, who can prophesy, and force him to speak. She provides Menelaus and three of his companions with the skins of seals, scoops out holes in the sand for them to hide in and covers them with with the seal skins . . . Proteus emerges from the sea, counts his heard and, having reassured himself, lies down to sleep. This is the moment for Menelaus and his companions to leap upon him, seize him and hold him fast. Proteus tries to escape from them by assuming all kinds of shapes. First he turns into a lion, then into a snake; but they still keep hold of him. He becomes a panther and then a giant boar; but they do not let go. He turns into water and then a tree in full leaf; but still they hold him fast. All the transformations by which he tries to escape take place within the grasp of their hands. In the end he tires, resumes his own shape . . . asks them what they want and answers their questions . . . Each transformation is an attempt to break out in another shape, in a different direction . . . but each is fruitless and ends where it began. 44

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag), 337.43

Ibid., 344. 44

! ! � 39

Each is fruitless and ends where it began. I question Canetti’s assessment of fruitlessness

here. Yes, Proteus failed to escape, which was his immediate goal; however, I would argue that

the opportunity for and process of transformation is of greater value. The adversity that

Menelaus and his friends represented was a gift to Proteus that prompted him to question the

efficacy of his own form. Menelaus offers Proteus the chance to exercise his power, to review his

own reality; in the end he returns to the place he began, but not unchanged. For this process not

only provided practical information regarding Menelaus’ escape from Egyptian waters, but also

allowed Proteus to see himself. Much is to be gained from intentional transformation over time.

!. . .

! The story of Proteus provides a clear metaphor for what I have been up to for the last

three years in the B-Paintings Project. Hold the story of Proteus in your mind as we move into

EXHIBIT H, a transcript of a recent studio visit I had with my friend, colleague, and PNCA in-

structor Gordon Barnes. Our longstanding association (eight years) has given him particular

insight into the B-Paintings Project.

! ! � 40

EXHIBIT H: TRANSCRIPT (GORDON BARNES ) 45

!10/22/14 !062 (13:51) !Gordon Barnes: It’s hard for me to separate them [the paintings] from you. !G: They are somewhat autobiographical. !GB: That’s what I think is so cool about it. I always tell people—and it sounds like a catchphrase—but, the way to the universal is through the personal. I think that you’ve nav-igated that tricky balance nicely here. The metaphor is potent, it’s graceful, it’s simple and doesn’t feel overwrought or overly strate-gic. It feels like a natural A to B progression that ended up in the same class as other things but didn’t start there. !G: Yeah. It surprised me, the feeling of it at the end. It alluded to all these things that I love but didn’t try to make, such as my experience with Reinhardt’s work, or Blinky Palermo, or Agnes Martin. All this work that I have res-onated with at one point or another—its here—but I didn’t. . . . !GB: It’s funny that this was your path to it. You know, the path of most resistance, one that I’m familiar with, I think you are too. I think, in the light of the year that you’ve had, and everything that’s been happening, it’s so nice to see something resolve so satisfy-ingly and in a surprising way. That’s the

!challenging part. Because I think you could have gotten this to resolve in a predictable way, but the fact that you didn’t expect to ac-tually like the objects, and now, at the end, the objects have a certain cult power to them from the process that they’ve been through. !G: Yeah. I feel like I didn’t believe in that. !GB: I know, it’s like “Gary found faith!” [laughs] Through this circuitous route, Gary’s now a believer again. Which totally cracks me up. Because, I mean, Jesus, man, with your experience, you’ve been around the block a couple of times with these different sort of fads in the art world, and feeling like you got some momentum, and feeling like it’s not where you want to be and it’s not happening the way you want it to, questioning the whole thing, getting politically burned on it. So, to end up here, at the end of this process that you were contem-plating walking away from with something that renews your faith in what you’re doing rather than obliterates it. I don’t think there are very many people in your position who could get to the end of something like this and have something positive as a result. They could have something livable, or something they could tolerate, but not something that actually renews. This has potential to remind you that in spite of all that shit, this is the metaphor for your life and other people’s lives. This could be that fresh start that reminds you what’s cool about making art and why you do it. It’s poetic and easy. It doesn’t feel

Barnes was at my thesis proposal presentation but was not privy to the subsequent development of the B-Paintings 45

Project since that time. This was the first time he had seen the work since the proposal, a period of approximately 5 months.

! ! � 41

labored—it feels natural. It doesn’t feel over-wrought. !G: It’s really strange that it doesn’t feel over-wrought based on the fact of how much labor has gone into the generation of each one of these things. !GB: Yeah, I imagine. It’s hard to believe that each of them has been what, ten different paintings? !G: Yes. !GB: I mean that’s an incredible act of faith anyway. To destroy one painting is an act of faith. To destroy multiple paintings multiple times is inherently an act of faith, knowing that whatever’s next is going to be better, or informative, or different in some interesting way. To put all the time into getting there. You weren’t just haphazardly slapping shit down just to build up layers and then obliterate it. Each one of them was done with the same seriousness. I think that’s important because you could have been like, “Yeah, this layer’s pink. Splat. A couple lines. Fuck it, it’s done. On to the next one.” I think that the fact that you treated each one of them as if they were a finished piece, and then destroyed it, or buried it, to turn it into something better. It’s a cool fucking metaphor. It just is. ![pause] !And I love the fact that it would be so easy to dismiss, and easy to miss everything in there. It’s hiding in plain sight. That to me is another clever little twist. It’s not immediately visible to people who aren’t sensitive to it. It may take

time and it may take effort to deconstruct and see what has gone into the creation of this supposed blankness. !

. . . !I love the glows coming off of them too. The subtle weird color coming off of them. The yel-low glow on that one. And this one has almost a hazy, shifting, yellow-green happening in it. And some of the others I can pick up colors. !G: Even the ones with black edges are casting light. It’s much more subtle, but when you see the pink one do it then you start noticing. !GB: Yeah, you start watching. If they were all like that pink one I would think, well, maybe it’s a little heavy handed, you’re emphasizing that in a weird way. But what it does is make the subtle ones come into focus. Now I’m look-ing for it. !G: I was talking to Lennie about the paintings and the digital print of the entire archive rep-resented as a grid, and we realized that they both do a similar thing, this obfuscation—all the information and hiding of the information. !GB: Revelation of the information can also be a form of hiding. What information is there? How it is sequenced, how it’s presented, all of that context matters a whole lot. So, you have a good puzzle to solve there, to wrestle with, in terms of how to manage it, how much of the back story to show and how. I like the idea of them having some sort of digital component because it’s somewhat unexpected and to me

! ! � 42

it “gamifies” the deconstruction of it in a way that’s accessible. !G: One of the midterm review panelists [James Reed] had a similar response to you—he doesn’t know me or know anything about the project—but he had a wonder response. Then I handed him the iPad and he said it totally shifted his entire experience, this distancing. !GB: Right. He didn’t want to have the map markers. He was having more fun inventing it on his own. !G: He called it the organic experience of it. !GB: That’s the thing about an app: it is unob-trusive. You don’t have to turn it on. Whereas, if you present the information, it does some-thing different, it forces people to make some sort of connection. The app is a total personal decision if you take the steps necessary to en-gage with it that way. I don’t think it needs it. I like the fact that it’s there as a bonus. I don’t think it needs anything, honestly. I don’t think it needs any of the history to be what it is, or to allude to the bigger concept. All of these decisions now get to be gravy. The work does what it’s supposed to do on it’s own. You don’t really need a decoder ring for it, but it’s nice to provide one. It opens it up to a broader audi-ence. It explains it in a concise way, while still leaving mystery, for those who don’t get it immediately. The statement and how you cor-relate the various parallels you see this metaphor applying to could be important for the poetic context, for this process of renewal and, sort of, reincarnation. For me, it’s en-riched by having the ability to connect it to

personal history, to connect it to painting his-tory, to all sorts of things. The metaphor func-tions on a lot of different levels and has a de-ceptive amount of richness to it, which is what I love about it—everything folds back into that same deceptive richness. The paintings themselves are deceptively rich, the concept is deceptively rich. It’s like there’s a hidden gem feeling about it, which is what I appreciate most about art. That experience of seeing something I didn’t see before, or knowing something I couldn't know before. I think it has that, ironically: through the mechanism of hiding, it has the element of discovery.

! ! � 43

EXHIBIT I: ZERO POINTS !!

[T]ruths we don’t suspect have a hard time making themselves felt, as when thirteen species of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females stay undiscovered due to bias against such things existing, we have to meet the universe halfway. Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what looks to us like nothing.

—Alice Fulton !!

. . .

!! A nothing that says something speaks louder than everything. The presence of that

which is absent is more visceral and alive than that which is flesh and bones standing right next

to you. The zero is more solid than rock for rock rests on zero. Without zero the rock would fall

forever through space. George Perec writes of zero points in his book Species of Spaces. He iden-

tifies a range of historical zero points dealing with measurement:

!!Like everyone else I feel an attraction to zero points, for the axes of points of reference from which the positions and distances of any object in the universe can be determined: !—the Equator —the Greenwich Meridian —sea-level !

! ! � 44

or the circle on the parvis in front of Notre-Dame (it disappeared, alas, when they were making the car park and no one has thought to put it back) from which all French dis-tances by road were calculated. 46

!!With the exception of “sea-level,” all of the zero-points to which Perec refers were superimposed

upon the surface of reality by people. Zero can move—only habit holds it fast. We can name

anything zero that strikes our fancy. 47

Ernst Bloch uses the term zero point very specifically as a philosophical device. For

Bloch, a zero point indicates “a place of extremity in which a confrontation between what exists

and has been realized strikes against the undetected or eclipsed.” B-Paintings 1-9 embody 48

Bloch’s zero point. The B-Paintings Project remains in a place of constant zero. When I finally

painted the surfaces of B-Paintings 1-9 white, they were returned to their original state: blank-

ness. Their histories were concealed, and yet they still exist. The fact that new images can be ap-

plied to the surface of the B-Paintings holds them in a perpetual state of possibility—waiting to

begin. The undeniable evidence of the B-Paintings’ history, found on the edges and in the trac-

ery of their surfaces, resists all beginning. Therefore, B-Paintings 1-9 float in an ambivalent ten-

sion between past and future, near and far, presence and absence, beginning and end.

!!

!!

Georges Perec and John. Sturrock. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London, England; New York, N.Y., USA: Pen46 -guin Books, 1997), 82.

Please see THESIS PROPOSAL, page xiv in the front matter, third paragraph. 47

Peter Thompson and Slavoj Zizek, eds. The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (SIC 8. 48

Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2013), 168.

! ! � 45

EXHIBIT A: TRANSCRIPT 006 !10/14/2014 !ON THE TOPIC OF REINVENTION (THINGS AREN’T WHAT THEY SEEM). !File 045 (10:23) !L: If we go full circle—it’s probably not a circle, our conversation, it’s probably rather elliptical, or possibly a hyperbola—we started with this idea of exchange and value, and the acknowl-edgment the audience can provide that you exist. Not only do you exist, but you thought about some stuff and you did this, this, and this and here [on the surface of the canvas] is a bit of trace information—I can see it on the edges, I can see marks in here. That brings up the vul-nerability of, “Yeah, you exist, so what? Why should I care?” You’ve spent all of this time do-ing something totally inconsequential and it doesn’t really work in the way you intended it to work—but you have a record of it. !G: Yes. !L: I don’t think that’s bad. At least if you begin to frame it in these terms, it talks about every-body, what one does in their daily lives. You know, you do these things and the meaning is in the whole of it, not each individual part, so what you are talking about is the experience. At one level, you could say that you are exhibit-ing labor and thinking, and labor and making. You produced something and then you recon-textualize it and you recontextualized it until it was exhausted. This is about a life that is rein-venting itself. That’s one way to look at it. !

!You’re also saying, well, things aren’t always what they seem. Which would be enough. Even if they just got that it would be enough.

! ! � 46

EPILOGUE

!!

. . .!

!! The B-Painting Archive remains a place of potential confrontation between what exists

(now) and what has been undetected (the future). As the digital objects of the archive move in the

virtual realm, or find platforms to re-manifest in the material world, points of contact and ten-

sion that lead to new information will no doubt emerge. This can already be seen with the devel-

opment of the iPhone application, B-View, which allows the user to experience a spatially orient-

ed history of the images held in each B-Painting. With the B-Paintings, I compressed large 49

amounts of time and information into the limited space of their collective surface area. The B-

View app enables the compressed time and information to be uncompressed and unpacked with-

in the hybrid space that exists between the viewer and the art object.

B-View was designed and built by John Guenin (Burning Robot) and is available from the iTunes store or at 49

http://www.bpainting.co. B-View is exclusively for iOS devices and can only be used within physical proximity to the actual B-Paintings.

! ! � 47

APPENDIX I: TEA PROJECT INDEX !!Renegade Tea Parties (RTP) 1-9 !Cold, Wet, Kombucha. PDX. 03/30/06. Pink and Yellow. PDX. 04/17/06 Orange and White with Forest Green Accents. PDX. 05/16/06 Black, White, and Greyscale. PDX. 05/27/06 Travel and Mystery with Emphasis on the Mustache. PDX. 06/27/06 White: Badminton, Birthday, and Birds with Rainbow and Bird Accessories. PDX. 08/05/06 Favorites and Farewell End of Summer Show and Tell. PDX. 09/28/06 Red: Revolutionary, Evolutionary, Pant-less. Brooklyn, NY. 11/15/06 Emerald City: White, Silver, and Green with Unicorn Accessories. PDX. 01/11/07 !ReMemories 1-9 (Revisitations of original RTP sites exactly one year later) !Cold, Wet, Kombucha. PDX. 03/30/07 Pink and Yellow. PDX. 04/17/07 Orange and White with Forest Green Accents. PDX. 05/16/07 Black, White, and Greyscale. PDX. 05/27/07 Travel and Mystery with Emphasis on the Mustache. PDX. 06/27/07 White: Badminton, Birthday, and Birds with Rainbow and Bird Accessories. PDX. 08/05/07 Favorites and Farewell (Tiny Tea Party). PDX. 09/28/07 Red: Revolutionary, Evolutionary, Pant-less (Bi-coastal via Skype). PDX and Brooklyn, NY. (The New School for So-cial Research) 11/15/07 Emerald City: White, Silver, and Green with Unicorn Accessories. PDX. 01/11/08 !Direct Collaborations 1-9 !Thank You Tea Party. PDX. Laura Aiken, Philip Cheney, Heather MacKenzie. 01/27/07. Secret Tea Party: Elephant and Trees. PDX. Feb 2007 Welcome Back Spring (Wear a Tie and Sing). Tuey Burns. PDX. Mar 2007. Tea Project is Dead. TBA Tea Project volunteers and crew. PDX. Lone Fir Cemetery. Sep 2007. Up on the Roof Tea Party. Participants/address unknown. Toronto, ON. 10/03/07. Back Porch Tea Party. Hope Hilton. NYC. Hunter College/Times Square Gallery. Dec 2007. Barter, Bronze, and Bling Tea Party. Rudy Speerschneider (Junior Ambassador's). PDX. Jan 2008 Black and White: Voice of America (VOA) Tea Party. Suli Yi and Voice of America Asia. PDX (First event to be held at Place gallery). 06/09/10. Tea Project at Vancouver School of the Arts and Academics. Crystal Zeller, the student body, and staff of VSAA. Van-couver, WA. 10/03/11 !!!!

! ! � 48

!(Appendix I continued) !Self Portrait: 1980-2007 1-3 (for PICA TBA Festival 07) !Yellow: Recess Tea Party 1980-1984. PDX. Meriwether Lewis School. 09/09/07 Blue: Silent Tea Party 1986-1997. PDX. Reed College Cooley Memorial Gallery. 09/11/07 Red: For Possibilit(ea)y 1993-2007. PDX. Remsky-Korsakoffee House. 09/15/07 !!After the Beginning Prior to the End 1-3 (for Open Engagement Conference 07) !The Past: Black and Blue (Beginning of the End or Simulation of Desire). Regina, SK. 10/11/07 The Future: Red, White, and Birth (End of the Beginning). Regina. Regina, SK. 10/12/07 Now: Beg, Borrow, or Steal (The Denial of the Democratic Empire / Rise of the Cynical Facade). 10/13/07

! ! � 49

APPENDIX II: B-PAINTING INDEX !!BP1 !BP1/000 - July 26, 2011 7:57 PM BP1/001 - October 12, 2012 6:20 PM BP1/002 - February 28, 2013 4:17 PM BP1/003 - May 13, 2013 1:53 PM BP1/004 - July 29, 2013 1:52 PM BP1/005 - February 5, 2014 3:36 PM BP1/006 - May 13, 2014 2:32 PM BP1/007 - July 14, 2014 5:19 PM BP1/008 - July 21, 2014 10:12 AM !BP2 !BP2/000 - July 26, 2011 8:00 PM BP2/001 - October 12, 2012 5:28 PM BP2/002 - February 28, 2013 3:57 PM BP2/003 - May 13, 2013 1:57 PM BP2/004 - July 29, 2013 1:35 PM BP2/005 - February 5, 2014 3:31 PM BP2/006 - May 13, 2014 3:05 PM BP2/007 - July 14, 2014 5:37 PM BP2/008 - July 21, 2014 10:21 AM !BP3 !BP3/000 - July 26, 2011 8:02 PM BP3/001 - October 12, 2012 6:10 PM BP3/002 - February 28, 2013 4:03 PM BP3/003 - May 13, 2013 2:17 PM BP3/004 - July 29, 2013 1:50 PM BP3/005 - February 5, 2014 4:03 PM BP3/006 - May 13, 2014 2:50 PM BP3/007 - July 14, 2014 5:33 PM BP3/008 - July 21, 2014 11:10 AM !

BP4 !BP4/000 - July 26, 2011 8:05 PM BP4/001 - October 12, 2012 5:45 PM BP4/002 - May 13, 2013 2:11 PM BP4/003 - July 29, 2013 1:33 PM BP4/004 - February 5, 2014 4:19 PM BP4/005 - February 5, 2014 4:19 PM BP4/006 - May 13, 2014 2:01 PM BP4/007 - July 21, 2014 9:50 AM BP4/008 - July 23, 2014 12:38 PM !BP5 !BP5/000 - July 26, 2011 8:08 PM BP5/001 - February 28, 2013 4:13 PM BP5/002 - February 5, 2014 4:10 PM BP5/003 - May 13, 2014 2:18 PM BP5/004 - July 14, 2014 5:09 PM BP5/005 - July 21, 2014 10:59 AM BP5/006 - July 23, 2014 12:25 PM BP5/007 - Sept. 11, 2014 2:44 PM BP5/008 - October 6, 2014 4:26 PM !BP6 !BP6/000 - July 26, 2011 8:10 PM BP6/001 - October 12, 2012 5:56 PM BP6/002 - February 28, 2013 3:28 PM BP6/003 - May 13, 2013 2:01 PM BP6/004 - July 29, 2013 1:54 PM BP6/005 - February 5, 2014 4:40 PM BP6/006 - May 13, 2014 2:25 PM BP6/007 - July 14, 2014 5:28 PM BP6/008 - July 21, 2014 10:32 AM !

BP7 !BP7/000 - July 26, 2011 8:13 PM BP7/001 - October 12, 2012 5:51 PM BP7/002 - February 28, 2013 3:46 PM BP7/003 - May 13, 2013 2:15 PM BP7/004 - July 29, 2013 1:48 PM BP7/005 - February 5, 2014 3:15 PM BP7/006 - May 13, 2014 2:58 PM BP7/007 - July 14, 2014 5:42 PM BP7/008 - July 21, 2014 10:37 AM !BP8 !BP8/000 - October 12, 2012 5:36 PM BP8/001 - February 28, 2013 4:22 PM BP8/002 - May 13, 2013 2:04 PM BP8/003 - February 23, 2014 12:30 PM BP8/004 - February 5, 2014 4:33 PM BP8/005 - May 13, 2014 3:10 PM BP8/006 - July 14, 2014 5:51 PM BP8/007 - July 21, 2014 10:02 AM BP8/008 - July 23, 2014 12:31 PM !BP9 !BP9/000 - July 26, 2011 8:44 PM BP9/001 - October 12, 2012 6:15 PM BP9/002 - February 28, 2013 3:41 PM BP9/003 - May 13, 2013 2:08 PM BP9/004 - July 29, 2013 1:56 PM BP9/005 - February 5, 2014 3:54 PM BP9/006 - May 13, 2014 2:39 PM BP9/007 - July 14, 2014 5:46 PM BP9/008 - July 21, 2014 10:50 AM

!

! ! � 50

APPENDIX III: B-PAINTING ARCHIVE (2011-2014) !!!! !!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!

! ! � 51

APPENDIX IV: TRANSCRIPT (FIRST STUDIO VISIT WITH LENNIE PITKIN)

!!!!

� !!!!!

! ! � 52

!!

� !!!!!!!!!!

! ! � 53

!!!

�

! ! � 54

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