people will always come to my work with questions, or find themselves perplexed, but above all i hope that they enjoy the experience of being with the work. my motive is to distract above all.

i don't want to see anything except for a herse stuck in traffic, and a noose with a trampoline

i wish i had never met any of you because the more aware i become of your motion the more i am aware of my own stagnance. i'm more frustrated with myself for placing all of the blame on you.

my dear god,

you forgot how hot the water was.

as i continue to read interviews between artists, young and old, i begin to understand that one key aspect of our generation and understanding the work that we make is the notion of nostalgia and parody, which i will elaborate on once i organize my thoughts more, but i needed to have this down in the first place before i do anything else.

some questions to ask:
-why is this the case?
-who are prime examples of this?

Things to remember:

The redman group
Dress up like Santana
Do subtitled stills of every new subtitle in the movie “the burbs”

for every one thing you create, you create two.

A Poem

A poem
(Of many words)

Concerning/ For a sculpture

Max,

You have made a very strange decision, not a terrible one, not a great one-- just very odd and I'm not sure how to respond or where you are going with these things. It is too soon to say whether you are consciously abstaining from your responsibility or if you are merely being lazy. I think that you should step back, have some coffee and then go back to sleep. You'll see how difficult things are when you are refreshed and how difficult and shameful it is to become stagnant.

Thank you,
Max

Too Many Pop Culture References.

I was internally embarassed today in class when we were asked to discuss the effectiveness of a the following passage in describing a piece.

Diderot, on Taraval’s The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpent:

One sees at right a frightened servant, then Alcemene and her husband. The latter grasps his child and lifts him from the cradle. In the neighboring cradle, the seated young Hercules holds a serpent by the neck in each hand and strains his arms, body, and head in strangling them. In the left background, beyond the cradles, some women trembling for him. At the far left, two more standing women; they’re quite calm. One of them, seen from the back, points towards the heavens and seems to say to her companion: The son of Jupiter. On the same side, columns. Between these columns, an ample curtain attached to the ceiling to form a canopy over the cradle.

We were asked to read this passage before actually seeing the piece. I-- who equate everything I know to the cartoons of my childhood-- immediately related the entire scene to the Disney interpretation in which the fictional Disney characters, Pain and Panic transform into serpents and proceed to attack the infant Hercules. I often wonder if this is a quality of most of my generation. I am very ashamed of it, and also of my inability to keep from associating things to children's movies and television. I am in a dilemma of whether or not to embrace this.

A Paper I Wrote (Accidentally) Last Minute

I wrote this paper last minute after a series of terrible prioritization. The subject is a miniature, displayed currently in the show Shrunken Treasures at the Walter's Museum in Baltimore, MD. I found it quite difficult to focus on a specific piece for the assigned amount of two pages, but very easy to comment on the curatorial choices and the difficulty or ease in engaging in the work.

Max Guy
9/12/2009
Intro to Art Criticism
Description of a Miniature

What happens when art sacrifices monumentality for portability, personalization, functionality or affordability? How does a religious work shift in scale and still maintain that same quality of the fantastic or magnificent. Shrunken Treasures, the current exhibition in the Manuscripts Gallery at the Walters museum offers a collection of works spanning the 12th to 19th centuries exploring the pros, cons and functions of miniatures. 

Upon entering the Manuscripts Gallery the soft lighting and walls—painted a color somewhere between maroon and eggplant— set up the viewer for about an hour of quiet inspection. Miniatures are dispersed throughout the gallery, in vitrines that cover the perimeter and center of the gallery. A prayer book of Marie de Medici created in 12th Century Italy, is but one of many prayer books exhibited, but stands alone as the highlight of the exhibition in its own vitrine, open to an example of custom lace patterning that occupies the entire book. Although there are plaques describing functions and qualities of the miniatures they do not appear to be organized in any specific fashion. Each item is given a generous amount of space (perhaps as far as 1½ feet in diameter) leaving a very underwhelming feeling on the viewer. This is a possible a drawback for the exhibition, but it also invites viewers to choose an individual piece for further inspection. 

Some Questions From A Painting Class

I had a list of questions on painting for my class, Automatic Triggers-- and I am going to post the answers now. Automatic triggers is a painting class that finds its origins in the painting processes of the surrealists and its followers, I have a different agenda for my work in this class. My answers will likely annoy many readers but I hope that they answer the questions in a manner that I will not have to post the questions as well.

To me, painting is a challenge and takes seriously talent and effort to execute well. I make paintings because it is a long-standing institution in the field of art and one of the few media that I am certain is an art form.

A painting is the interaction of applied color on a surface. I say this to differentiate painting from photography, in which chemicals are manipulated on a surface to develop into a color, rather than a pigment, or previously existing color being applied to a surface.

When painting is successful the viewer is able to engage it for an extended amount of time and not only address a multitude of issues, but is compelled to.

Hey

So I've started this blog, hopefully to touch up on issues of being an art student in this contemporary world. Living in Baltimore right now means being around tons of people who are taking things into their own hands in terms of the development of the art world. Not only are young people organizing house galleries and performances but stand alone venues that they built themselves. I hope to use this blog to gather my own thoughts on the development of the art scene here in Baltimore, and to further my involvement in it. Ideally I would like to produce some sort of publication, but further thoughts on that later.