The Artifact.

The artifact as a subject has been a recent topic in my work. My interest in the artifact initially came from a personal involvement with performance art that started about four years ago. While I was in college there was a general re-visiting of the second wave feminist movement and as a result I was looking at artists who dealt with taboo subjects in the 1960’s and 70’s. I experimented with performance partially to understand how it worked as a political apparatus and also because I wanted to find out which taboo subjects existed in the art world at the time. I arrived at some conclusions, most of which are inconsequential to what I am doing right now but while I was exploring these subjects I momentarily abandoned painting to focus on performance. Eventually, I began to think of such things as Carolee Schneeman’s Internal Scroll and Eve Klein’s Anthropométries, objects that function as recordings of time-based significant actions or performance artifacts.

Formal Modification, Cosmetic Layer.

I have a new show coming up, and while curating, it’s been good to reevaluate things that I had done in the past, and to compare them to the recent work made in Korea. What is surprising are not the differences, but the similarities between now and before, and in realizing this I have become aware of a habit that I’m starting to consider very essential to my modus operandi. Maybe I had tried to describe it before but had failed, but here is another attempt.

Culture is Exclusive.

Is culture like a collective curatorial project? Cornel West defines culture in Prophetic Reflections, p. 137, as "values and attitudes that are embodied or expressed in texts, artifacts, or performances, sustained by communities over time, preserving various identities of unique individuals within those communities." It's interesting to think about how much of this process is constructed subconsciously and how much of it is schemed. Any culture that may be described by a word plus the morpheme '-ness' is inherently talking about purity. Considering the history of purity in relationship to the human race, it's hard to live without paranoia.