Something to tease you with...

Here are some images I took of the work when I visited Joel's studio a couple of weeks ago- notice his interest in texture and color. WOW!







The artist's space/materials

moving right along...

view of the Ganges from the back of a boat, sunrise pooja

Studio Visit: dead dog, Gange-fication, trash piles...

This will be an amazing show...

I can already tell. I've never been one to be optimistic or uncritical. However, I can honestly say, after visiting Joel's studio, Memphis is going to be blown away.

Most of the pieces are made from everyday materials: pieces of glass, neon plastic ribbon, fake fur, but when manipulated by the magical hands of Joel, they take on new meaning and are transformed into precious objects that narrate a specific moment of Joel's experience in India. The colors, the textures, the installations..this show is going to be great.

And. I think we have a space!

my first indian wedding

even scientists don’t know why sweet water flows eternally from a cow skull at the top of the mountain in the distance. even the groom doesn’t know the bride. even you can’t understand.

Speaking of...

flags, I'm going to Christine Buckton Tillman lecture tonight (Rhodes College, 7:00), and I hope she talks about these slip-cast porcelain flags:

I been loving some flags. Her show, General Merriment, opens at Material on Friday.

night one: mumbai

the night of my arrival: a thousand moons (one for every puddle) shone up into the sputtery, blustery end-of-moonsoon midnight as a thousand small parades converged dancing at the seashore to toss a thousand elephant headed Ganeshes into the ocean. flower petals in my hair, red gulal powder on my shoulders, and betel nut staining my lips.

studio view

monsoon

dead dog in a ditch

dookie sparkle

holy, holy, holy - washed in the ganges

when i was in Varanasi i had a pair of underwear washed in the Ganges in order to absolve them of all sins. now they are holy, holy, holy. i'm learning embroidery so i can properly commemorate this, one of the highlights of my pilgrimage.

re: looking for a space

Jerry Saltz wonders, Can Space Break?

...Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors...the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years. As this type of art fades, these spaces can be seen for what they are: theatrical, generalizing, antiseptic environments that make art look like it’s in an isolation cell or an operating room.

The white cube today is a parody of itself. Since these spaces first appeared in the seventies, a monstrous reversal has taken place. Where once the ethos of the architecture arose from and worked with the art on view, today art is being determined by the viewing spaces, which have mutated to a point where they are the main content of any show. The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a viewer’s journey, shifts the emphasis from process to product, and lacks individuality and openness. It’s not that art should be seen only in rutty bombed-out environments, but it should seem alive.

since Plan A said NO...

POSSIBLE SPACES?

Just a thought...

flags

studio view

a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterwards, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth's eager devotion.

-lorrie moore, birds of america

s2: stockholm syndrome

Stockholm {Patty Hearst standing in the lobby of a bank holding an assault rifle screaming "I'm Tania!"} Syndrome 

`

in {turnin me every way but loose and now I wear lungis and bobble my head} dia

christine and i are looking for a space

with walls that i can fuck up
hammer into
paint on
etc.

the space need not be too finished or tidy. should have power. but walls are most important.

i'm thinking about this article about installation written by a man named boris.

christine is probably thinking about shoes.

s1: varanasi

I stand on the steps that lead down to the bottom of the Ganges and people come up from out of the river and push against me, wet with holy shit water, ash dead water, dead people, fingernails and babies water, because babies can die too. I think that even people who know my name can die (Thank You). There is smoke in the air. I want desperately for the smoke to be so much incense, backyard barbecues, cheap cigars, but I know that the smoke is people. It stains the buildings where they cook rice and wake up in the morning and fight - they, the living, who carry stretcher-bound bodies through the streets wrapped in goldred sheets.

The heads on the stretcher bodies loll from side to side as they're carried down the alleys, covered. That's how you can tell. That's what I learned from TV.

Wealthy Indians who had fallen on hard times used to burn their clothes to extract the gold embroidery threads from them, they say.

They also say dying is like taking off one set of clothes and putting on another.

I need to pick up my laundry from that woman.

At the burning ghats on the bank of the Ganges there are a lot of bodies to be burned, a real pile up, so there is a fair amount of waiting around. Some of the young men (still soft) cry. Old men play cards, as old men do while death is waiting just over there. They don't allow women here - death is men's business. I'm waiting too. I wonder, how does a wet mound of flesh ever burn away? Three hours or so. Sizzle and some spit, puff and collapse. Great green scales weigh the fire wood that will consume each body, pitting the fullness of a life against a few sticks. It's rigged - the sticks always win. Dead wood, dead weight on a scale. Waiting, also. Every once in a while a hollow pop shoots from the embers and the hollowness of my gut responds, like to like, ashes to ashes.

On top of the dead people, standing on every rooftop, kids fight tissue paper kites, laughing and dancing in the smoke to the rhythms of some New Smash Hit Bollywood Jams. The kids fight with the kites and the kites fight with the wind. A string snaps and a kite flies off toward the Ganges, then the fight is over - a looser and a winner. The kite flies over the river as some untouchable man below scatters ashes into it.

I see that the tale cannot be told in this way.

But how can it be told, this tale of a unique journey, of a unique communion of minds, of such a wonderfully exalted and spiritual life?...I feel like the old surviving servant of perhaps one of the Paladins of Charles the Great, who recalls a stirring series of deeds and wonders, the images and memories which will disappear with him if he is not successful in passing some of them on to posterity in word or picture, tale or song. But in which medium is it possible for the story of the Journey to be told? I do not know. Already this first attempt, begun with the best intentions, leads me into the boundless and incomprehensible. I simply wanted to try to depict what I have remembered of the course of events and individual details of our journey. Nothing seemed more simple...Instead of a fabric, I hold in my hands a bundle of a thousand knotted threads which would occupy hundreds of hands for years to disentangle and straighten out, even if every thread did not become terribly brittle and break between the fingers as soon as it is handled and gently teased out.

I imagine that every historian is similarly affected when he begins to record the events of some period and wishes to portray them sincerely. Where is the center of events, the common standpoint around which they revolve and which gives them cohesion? In order that something like cohesion, something like causality, that some kind of meaning might be revealed and that it can in some way be told, the historian must invent units, a hero, a nation, an idea, and he must allow to happen to this invented unit what has in reality happened to the nameless.

If it is so difficult to relate connectedly a number of events which have really taken place and have been arrested, it is in my case much more difficult, for everything becomes questionable when I consider it closely, everything slips away and dissolves.

-Herman Hess, A Journey to the East

tell me all about it

is what people generally say when they see me for the first time after my recent return from a year-long trip around the world. truth is, i have no idea how to even begin to talk about it. things like "well, gold lame and brown packing tape...then there was the Ganges...motorcycle crash, but there were these torches..." come out of my mouth.

i told someone that it was like spending a year learning a new language that only you can speak. they stared at me blankly.

so i've been making some things about it, and christine asked if we could make a show of the things. so this is the beginning of the telling - or rather, the beginning of talking about how impossible the telling can be. just about the four months i spent in India, for now. small pieces.

so now, when you say "tell me all about it"
i will probably tell you

it's the most beautiful secret
that i wouldn't even begin to know how to tell.