The first phase of the dramatic expansion at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has just opened, featuring a new building for contemporary art, BCAM (Broad Contemporary Art Museum), and large-scale sculptural installations by a number of artists including Charles Ray, Richard Serra, and others. Here are some photos I shot this evening of Urban Light, a sculpture by Chris Burden that incorporates more than two hundred restored cast-iron lampposts from Los Angeles County.

Continue reading Urban Light / Chris Burden @BCAM @LACMA

Live Webcast
Tonight, Thursday December 13
8:00 - 10:00pm Pacific Time
(9pm Mountain/10pm Central/11pm Eastern)

I’ve been invited by my friend, recording artist Diane Arkenstone, to join her on Thursday, December 13 for an evening of musical performance at Kulak’s Woodshed in North Hollywood. Diane Arkenstone & Friends will include several performers, including Diane, myself, Scot Byrd, Matt James and Jane George. The show runs from 8-10 pm Pacific Standard Time. I’ll be performing a 1/2 hour solo set of original songs early in the lineup. It promises to be a very enjoyable evening with an eclectic mix of music.

You can watch it live on the internet here at this link.

Kulak’s Woodshed in North Hollywood California is a live acoustic music, singer songwriter listening room and pioneering multi-camera webcast recording studio.

Hope you can tune in!

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Note: This is an old photo. I haven’t changed much, but unfortunately I no longer have the Mickey Mouse guitar.

I assume most of you have heard about the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike. I’m not sure how much attention it gets in other parts of the country (or the world, for that matter), but here in Los Angeles it’s a big story. This is after all an entertainment industry town, and the effects of the strike can be felt in every part of our local economy. My wife is a writer and a WGA member, as are many of our friends.

The strike has come about because of a disagreement between the corporations who own the movie and tv studios and the writers who create their content over how much, if at all, the writers should be compensated for their creative work. The writers contend that they should be getting a slightly larger share from the sale of DVDs of the movies they wrote. From the sale of a $28.95 DVD, the writer of the movie currently gets 4 cents, or as comedian Tim Kazurinsky points out, that ’s 4 cents out of 2,895 cents. The writers are asking for 8 cents.

But a bigger issue, and possibly the main one, is that the networks and studios want to pay the writers nothing, that’s ZERO $, for tv shows and movies that they (the corporations) post on their web sites. The corporations claim that these streaming videos are “promotional”, and that they shouldn’t have to compensate the writers for posting them. But these “promotional” shows have commercials, just like any regular tv show, and are a huge source of income for the studios. They just want to keep it all for themselves.

As Mark Harris notes in his Entertainment Weekly Online column, “Why the Striking Writers Are Right”:

“The problem with this position is that writers deserve a share of revenue for material they help to create. Not a share only if the revenue is really, really a lot. A share, period. If it turns out that streaming video is a goldmine, then both sides will get a lot of money. If it turns out not to be, they’ll get less. Corporations are fond of reminding their employees that they’re all a ‘’family'’ during tough times. But when families sit down to dinner, Dad doesn’t get to say, ‘’I'm gonna eat until I decide I’m full, and then we’ll see if there’s anything left for the rest of you.'’ The right of a writer to earn money from work that continues to generate revenue cannot be dependent on how comfy studio and network heads are with the fullness of their own coffers.”

The studios are responding to the strike by showing reruns, and more reality and talk shows. But many of the more popular talk shows themselves will have to be reruns, since people like David Letterman and Jay Leno don’t come up with all those clever lines off the tops of their heads. They are created by a staff of, you guessed it, writers. To their credit, both Leno and Letterman are supporting the writers’ position in this dispute.

For the personal reasons mentioned above, and also on principle, as an artist, I’m siding with the writers as well. It seems obvious to me that the people who profit from the success of a creative product should include the artists who actually created it, not just the executives who made the phone calls and brokered the deals. I don’t watch a whole lot of tv to begin with, but until this strike is over I’m not planning on watching any. I’m going to vote with my remote, and say no to corporate greed. I hope many other people do the same.

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Here are a couple of videos about the strike that you might find interesting:
Tim Kazurinsky on WGN
the writers of The Office

…just a Santa Monica seagull for Birgit,

Continue reading No Art, No Zombies

If you could hang out for an evening talking with any living person (or persons), who would your top 5 choices be? Here’s my list:

1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Brian Eno or Stewart Brand (or both)
3. Woody Allen
4. Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen (or both)
5. the Dalai Lama

  Who would you choose?

In the beginning, all music was live.

But since 1877, thanks to Thomas Edison, we’ve had sound recording. By the turn of the century, musicians could play in front of a microphone or two, and their performance would be captured, preserved and reproduced. People anywhere could listen to a singer or a band any time they wanted, by playing a record on their phonograph. Sound recording wasn’t considered an art form. The sole purpose of recording was to faithfully capture a live performance. Though the technology improved greatly over the first half of the 20th century, the role of recording remained the same.

In 1947 jazz guitarist Les Paul released a recording of himself playing 8 different guitar parts. This was the first known “multi-track” recording, and was made by recording onto wax discs. In the 50s, Buddy Holly would record a rhythm guitar track on one tape recorder, then play it back and play a lead guitar part along with it (or sing harmony w/ himself), recording both onto a second tape machine.

When the Beatles recorded their first albums in the early 60s, they were basically traditional recordings, in the sense that they would rehearse their parts and then perform them together live in the studio. Over then next few years they began using the new 4-track tape machines, that allowed them to add other tracks later, played either by themselves or other musicians. And they could adjust the mix (the relative volumes of instruments) after they were recorded. So they had more control over the recording process, but the goal was still to record something that sounded like a live performance, even if it wasn’t.

By the time they recorded Sgt. Pepper in 1967, and Abbey Road in 1969, everything had changed. The Beatles, along with their producer George Martin, were using the studio not just to capture their performances, but as a creative tool in itself. They recorded tracks backwards, or at faster and slower speeds. They cut up the tapes they had recorded and pieced them back together out of sequence. They layered tracks, both musical and otherwise, creating dense soundscapes that would be difficult, if not impossible to recreate in a live performance.

Were they cheating?

I ask this in the context of other discussions that have taken place here on A&P, about painters looking at photographs, or projecting photographs, or printing photographs on canvas. I ask it in the context of comments I’ve read elsewhere by photographers. About whether a photo composed in the camera is more legitimate than one that’s been cropped, or whether one that’s printed in a darkroom is more legitimate than one printed digitally, or whether the more an image is manipulated in Photoshop the less “true” it is.

I should mention that things in the music world, as I’m sure you know, have come a long way since the Beatles’ explorations. The number of tracks on tape recorders went up from 4 to 8, to 24 then 48, and at this point, with digital recording, are practically infinite. Drum tracks can be generated entirely in the computer, as can many other musical parts. Sounds can be sampled from the real world, or from other records, then used within a new recording. You can buy prerecorded loops of sounds (drum beats, bass parts, etc.) and use them in your projects. You can record the tracks for a song, then go back and correct out-of-pitch vocals, speed up or slow down tempos of individual tracks, and cut and paste sections from one part of the song to another, squashing and stretching them to fit. The same kinds of issues we discuss for visual art are also debated among musicians and music fans.

So where do you draw the line? When is it real art, and when is it cheating?

This is one of a series of 30 paintings that I did in the spring of 2001. The paintings were presented in a group exhibition here in Los Angeles on September 15th, just 4 days after the September 11th attacks (the show had been planned months in advance).

Where does the meaning come from in a work of art? Is it contained in the artwork itself, or does it come from somewhere else? Is it permanent, or can it change? How much control does the artist have over what is communicated by their work?

On the first day of class my freshman drawing teacher had us all go out and buy 9″ x 11″ hardbound sketchbooks. We were expected to carry them around with us over the course of the semester, and draw constantly. Now, thirty years later, I find that I have an encyclopedia set of these books filling a shelf in my studio. Keeping journals/sketchbooks has become an integral part of my art practice and my everyday life.  But the way I use them has changed.

               I think of a sketchbook as something you draw in, and a journal as something you write in. And though I’ve always used the same book for both, I see that mine have evolved over the years, from more sketchbook to more journal. In the early ones I did very involved drawings, sitting for hours doing studies from nature, or drawing people. These days the drawings in my journals tend to be notational, and if I do anything more finished it’s on single sheets of paper. 

              My journals function as sketchbooks, idea books, diaries and scrapbooks. I always have the current one with me, in the bookbag that I carry around, along with whatever I’m reading at the time. And over the years I’ve developed certain conventions for them. For example, I’ve gotten in the habit of starting each entry with the date, time and location, so it’s very easy for me now to look back through them and see when certain ideas initially occurred, or where I was when I was writing about something. I also, early on, started keeping a list on the back page of the journal of the books I read. I list the title, author, and the date I finished reading it, and if the book made a particularly strong impression on me I put a star next to it. So at this point I have a running list of pretty much every book I’ve read during my adult life, including re-reads, and a simple rating system that is useful when I want to go back and retrieve information, or recommend books to friends. When the journal is full I put a number on the spine and add it to the shelf, and I start a new one.

               These journals serve several functions for me. The most obvious is that they’re a place to store ideas so I don’t forget them. Putting them down on paper also forces me to clarify the ideas somewhat, at least enough to put them into words or a sketch, and it also relieves me of the burden of carrying them around in my head. Often seeing the idea on paper helps to spur variations. Sometimes these ideas are visual, sometimes verbal. Sometimes I’ll start with a quick drawing, spin out a verbal list of associations or connections, and then do more drawings. So the journal becomes a place to not only record ideas but also to develop them.

               The journals are not just for my art practice, but are part of my everyday life. I use them as diaries; to record my thoughts, concerns and activities. They are scrapbooks that contain newspaper clippings, postcards and concert tickets. I’ve been writing songs almost as long as I’ve been painting, and the journals contain endless lists of possible titles. It’s pretty obvious how a title can be a starting point for writing a song, but I’ve also had titles launch whole series of paintings. The old cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words also works in reverse –a word can evoke a thousand pictures. Sometimes the same title will result in both a song and a painting. I keep all of these possibilities pretty open-ended, and don’t try to figure them out right away.

               Keeping the journals has taught me a lot about my creative process. I see ideas appear, and then reappear months or even years later, but changed in some way. Like they’ve been percolating under the surface, accumulating resonance and layers of meaning without my awareness. I can read diary entries from years ago, see the things I was excited or worried about, and gain perspective on how they’ve played out in my life. And most of all, the journals are a library of ideas, some terrible and some pretty good, more ideas than I could ever execute in several lifetimes.  I’ve learned not to edit or judge the ideas when I get them, everything goes in, and later when I look back through I pick the ones that are most promising to pursue.

               When people visit my studio and see the journals lined up on my shelf, they say “Oh, you must be very disciplined. I’ve tried to keep journals before, but I always stop.” But the truth is that I’m not disciplined about it at all. Here’s the big secret, the way I’ve been able to keep these journals going all these years – I don’t write or draw in them every day. When you try to do something as a discipline, like a diet or a New Years resolution, it’s easy to start out very gung ho, then miss a day or two, and decide that you’ve failed and you might as well give up. In my case, sometimes I’m working in the journal several times a day, and other times weeks will go by without an entry. But I’ve always got it with me, so it’s there when I need it.

I’m sure many of you keep sketchbooks or journals of some kind. In what ways is your process similar to mine? How is yours different?

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