The sprays are very fine and close together so it creates a little cloud of suspended water that’s completely opaque in the center. Just lovely.

The curator who picked my piece is Danielle Fox, who owns Slate Gallery in Oakland, recently relocated to 25th Street to join the rest of the Art Murmur hive. She also purchased my piece; more joy!

Sometimes I worry that I’m all over the map with my creative excursions. But I just now picked up Wendy Richmond’s* book, Art Without Compromise, and read this:

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed.

Robert Rauschenberg

* Quotation from Wendy: “I am really smart for forty-five minutes each day.”

It’s been a busizily few days around here, so let’s recap:

Thursday art: collaborating on the new ji (backbeat) part for a taiko trio piece. Before, the piece was just three taiko. Now it has parts for shime and kane (the ji instruments).

Friday art: Putting together a fun outfit to wear for the Pro Arts event. (More on this later. The event, not my outfit. You have to dig the pink fake fur, though.)

Saturday art: Doing a tango/waltz with Raphael and a “we don’t know how to swing dance but let’s fake it” swing dance with Phil at the Fall Has Sprung Dance in Grass Valley.

Sunday art: Developing an idea I’ve been working on for awhile, an audio “tour” based on Janet Cardiff’s work.

Monday? We’ll see…

Today, what I’m calling art is selecting images from my files that I really like. I’m sending them to a friend who’s helping me spiff up my website to reflect more who I really am, instead of who I think other people think an organizer is like.

So, without further ado:

What do they have in common? Clean lines, bright colors, lots of green, kind of a 50′s look.

I decided to make them myself on my printer and cut them out with a scalloped scissors, just for kicks. Also, it’s easier to do that than cut perfect rectangles.

I’ve loved this photo since I discovered the amazing Rasterbator website a few years ago. You can upload a photo and get it converted to dots. Up close, it looks abstract, but if you back up, you can easily see the image. This is the same one I posted before, but here it is again.

If you can’t tell what it is, back up some more.

Case in point: Saturday was the deadline to deliver artwork for the Pro Arts Gallery annual fundraiser: Box Art and I delivered. Last year, I made a video of my block of wood. This year, well, something totally different!

Last year’s blocks had been sanded and looked like virgin lumber. This year, they were in their natural state as recycled beams. Scuffed brown paint, gouges, cracks, holes, etc. I decided to tell the story of this block, a possible story at least.

One of my inspirations was Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French novelist whose narrative strategy was to describe what could be seen from a certain window, for example. The narrator was obscure, as was his reason for describing any given scene, until the story got more involved. Slowly it dawned on the reader why particular information was being given and how emotionally weighted it was.

Okay, he’s really obscure and my sister hates the movie he wrote: Last Year at Marienbad.

Anyway.

My story isn’t quite that obscure, but I loved the idea of making up a story about why there’s a crack or a gouge in the block. The idea that there’s memory in the things around us, the things we touch.

I also like the crime scene feel to it, with the pins and tags marking each spot. The Courier typewriter font I used really adds to the noir feel, as does the discoloration and distressing of the paper.

For you locals, the auction/party is November 4th!

I talked to Jeremy, who’s going to be building a 50 foot exploding volcano island time machine for Burning Man 2012. Can hardly wait for that! Ran into Chris from the Trojan Horse project. Also ran into Flash, who I haven’t seen since my early playa days. Glad to know he’s still at it!

In true Burning Man spirit, I talked to a bunch of people I didn’t know and had some absurd, funny, touching conversations. That’s one of my favorite things about BMan.

That’s one of my favorite things to do, by the way. →

I went to the museum mainly to hear Bill Fontana’s Sonic Shadows. Fontana is a sound art pioneer and this work records the ambient sounds in the museum and plays them back as a soundscape. I thought it sucked.

To me, it sounded like machine noise, or random sounds. There was no discernible cause and effect between the museum patrons making noise walking, burping, dropping things, laughing, etc., and what the speakers were playing back. Meh.

The museum website says “the work creates an acoustic translation of the physical space.” Yeah, sort of the way that you get mud brown when you mix all the colors on your palette together. Whatever. I did get a nice shot of one of the high tech speaker thingies.

I was feeling kind of cranky about that, because I’d been looking forward to this show. I’ve been creating sound art for the past few years and find it incredibly satisfying and evocative. So it was a big letdown to find out that this “pioneer” is doing stuff that I think is boresville.

Okay, on to a highlight! I sat on the floor in the bookstore perusing the catalog for Pacific Standard Time, which is a ginormous exhibit that just started at the Getty and many other venues in SoCal. I really want to see this show! It covers the SoCal art scene from the end of WWII through the 80′s.

Ed Ruscha! Chris Burden! Ed Kienholz! Robert Irwin! So many of my bigtime faves! I was particularly enchanted with a performance/ installation by Allen Ruppersberg. He opened a “cafe” and here’s what was on the menu →

I would order cotton covered with stardust and Al’s burger: sky, land and water. Maybe with a side of toast and leaves. Yum.

Of course, I was already in Deep Playa, which is a world of magic. So this was a world of magic inside a world of magic!

I entered through the door you see here. There was another door opposite it labeled “not an exit.” The shack didn’t have a roof, but there was a 2×4 across the top that said “Look up.”

And then I added my own magic.

I made art on the playa! The theme this year was Rites of Passage, so it had to have doors in it. I could probably fit doors into any artwork, though. They are endlessly evocative.

The installation turned into a collaboration with Karen and John and that was an interesting process. I liked seeing my idea through the eyes of others but I realized how hard it can be to communicate subtle ideas. I’m used to making decisions because they feel right and not having to explain them.

It was also a new thing for me to build a structure, to have people help me go from concept to physical object. I don’t think I could have done that on my own. Then, on the playa, we were lucky to meet up with Jay Hall who volunteered to lend his construction expertise to the enterprise (and had fun doing it despite his feeble protests to the contrary). So nice to have a construction guy!

The location wasn’t right but it’s a good piece. I want to install it somewhere else where it can have space around it. It also needs quiet because (of course!) there’s a recorded narrative that goes with it. In the meantime, I’m creating a movie with stills of the installation and the narration.

So, what is it? It’s hard to tell from the photos, I know. It’s a room outlined with metal conduit. Each of the four sides has a door. The walls are strips of mesh that blow in the wind. When you go through a door, are you somewhere different?  Are you different?

A door is a marker that indicates passage. We mark time as we pass through life with doorways. This happened before. This happened after. Without those landmarks, we have no way of perceiving change, or progress. A rite such as a wedding or funeral has meaning only because we give it meaning. If we didn’t, our lives would be placid streams with no scale, no way of identifying what we are about and what we want to become.