It's up!

On Friday I (or rather, the crack team of wunderkids at the airport) installed the piece in terminal F at the Philadelphia airport. It's called Exotic Narrative, and it will be up until September.

It turns out that it is great to show work at an airport: a HUGE number of people see your work. I knew this, but I didn't know it. It was overwhelming: it was a river of people. You don't notice it when you're in it, rushing to catch a plane or waiting with other people for your flight. The Director of exhibitions told me that 330,000 people come through the airport every month. When you are standing still in a busy corridor of terminal F and you unroll a large painting on the floor behind a line of stanchions, people talk to you about it. Constantly. They talk to each other about it, they make faces they think no one can see, they mutter behind their breath, they stop and watch you hang like you are an animal in the zoo. It's cool. We installed all day: from about 9 to about 4, and I'd say someone stopped and talked to us every ten minutes.

"Is that airbrush?"
"Did you make that? Really? You made that. That's good."
"How did you make that? That's nice. I like that. "
"Look honey, that's pretty- I like that."
"Oooh, that's beaoooteeful."
"Will you do my kid's room? My little girl would like that. She likes pink."
"Can I take a picture?"
"Is that a story?"
"What is that? That's good, it looks nice."

"Miss, miss, miss." (This from the professional harasser who was hawking Frequent Flyer Miles at a mostly oblivious crowd.)
"Yeah?"
"You the artist?"
"Yeah."
"You have the most artistic hands I've ever seen."
"Thanks!"

He went back to harassing people: "I got frequent flyer miles, I'm giving em away, ten minutes only, oops, too late, you missed em, you sir! Do you have frequent flyer miles? I do, and I want to give them to you....Miss!"
"Yeah?"
" You have a lot of talent."
"Thanks!"
"I wasted mine a long time ago."
Now, I'd been watching this guy keep his spirits up for a good six hour shift of yelling at people who were ignoring him in a hallway, and I'd been listening to his patter, which was pretty stinking funny, all day long. So I was sure he was not without talent, but I couldn't figure out how to say that to him, so I just shoved out another cliche: "Never too late."
"You're right", he said, apparently satisfied, "Never too late, that's true. Never too late."

A red headed lady asked me if I was the artist. "So you made this?"
"Yup."
"Where else do you make these?"
"Anywhere anyone wants me to show them. I make them in my studio, but people put them up wherever."
"So you just make them?"
"Yup."
"Do you ever sell them?"
"Not really- they're pretty big. Sometimes I sell the small ones."
"So you just make them?"
"Yup."
"Huh." She wandered off, completely mystified.

Two very nice ladies wanted to know if they could take pictures. Several billion guys in airport jackets (baggage handlers?) said nice things, and almost all of them were funny. A guy on a cart drove up beside us. "This is very nice. Very good, don't you think?" We all nodded.
"I especially like that monkey I did." He said, then drove away as we all laughed.

Ursula, a lovely woman who is one of the installation team, told me that they always get a lot of comments about the art that they put up. The worst, she said was when they were taking down an exhibition about the Phillies and putting up a collection of antique ladies' hats. Everyone was sad about the Phillies going down, but one man said he liked the hats."Those are nice. I like those. I like those a lot."
"Really?" She said. He didn't seem the type.
"Oh yeah. Those must have been some fine women wearing those hats."

I'm really hoping to get some neat email responses to the piece. It meant a lot to me that people who aren't the typical contemporary art audience like the work. It was also great to talk to Leah, the director of the program, and Ursula, who had interesting things to say about the way I've translated my theories about beauty into this piece about fights between squirrels and monkeys and badgers. I left the airport feeling like I might be like a good pop artist: there are people who can't see what I'm doing with the content because they dismiss the pop forms, but the vast majority of viewers in a truly public space do see at least part of what I'm up to, and they like looking at it.

I don't think I'm a snob, but I think I had it in me to be one at some point years ago when I decided to make art using visual forms that scared me. There should have been no good reason that I was afraid to use bright colors, big scary snakes, and cartoons, but there was a time when I was afraid of alienating the kind of viewers who liked their art at a distance from the kinds of images that everyone understands. Deciding to attack those forms, to attack the side of myself that had learned what to avoid in order to make smart looking art, was the best decision I've ever made. It felt good right away to make work that I would have liked before I learned what I was supposed to like, and to try to push my intellectual content into forms that were visually rich and accessible. So now, ten years later, when I've been living with that for a while, it's gratifying to see that it's worked, to some extent, and it makes me extra grateful to the fine art people who are ballsy enough to get behind my work without patronizing it.

Tonight I'm going to watch, on Leah Douglas and Clint Takeda's recommendation, Pompoko, a movie with a cast that is almost entirely raccoons.

Images of the final piece

I finally put together and posted images of the completed piece for the airport. It's called Exotic Narrative, and it's online here. The image is large, so you may have to wait for it to load, and I'd avoid it if you have a slow modem. You should also know that this is also a working image: I'm getting the piece professionally photographed, but this version is crudely sewn together from several images in photoshop. I'm installing on Friday, and I'll try to take photos of the whole piece once it's up.

Putting work in an airport is fun. It's a little frightening in theory, but the Philadelphia Airport Exhibitions Initiative is great, and the prospect of having such a large piece in a place where so many people can see it is tremendously exciting. The exhibitions program staff assure me that I'll get lots of wacky email from people who were stuck in the airport with nothing to do but look at my work. And actually, what artist does NOT wish for a totally guilt-free opportunity to trap people into looking at their art? It seems pretty ideal to me. A friend of mine has a piece at the airport this month too, and she recently had occasion to fly out of the terminal where her work is: she said she was walking around in front of the piece holding the cover of a book that shows her work, hoping someone would notice, but no one did.

I'm so excited to see it all together-when I look at the images of each section that I put together in Photoshop all I can tell is that I have no idea what it will be like to see the whole thing stretched out in one big line.

Finished!

I'm done, finally, and I'm bursting with ideas for more paintings. I'm really glad I'm finished, but also really glad I had the opportunity to do such a long piece over such a long stretch of time. It was a real luxury. I've worked this large before, but always in a quick, anxiety ridden spurt. The piece I made last summer at Tufts was much bigger than this one, but I had about two weeks to do it, so I had no time for doubt or reflection. During the making of that piece I woke up, got as much food as I could get from the places that were open early or late into a bag, got to the gallery and worked as hard and fast as I could until, actually, I got so tired I cut myself with my stupid exacto knife. It became a private joke with me. I'd start that piece early in the morning, usually before the gallery staff got in, and I'd stay working as late as possible, getting more and more tired as everyone left the building. I was desperately afraid the whole time I was working that I wouldn't get done in time for the opening, and I'd over ride my normal sense of when I was too tired to work in order to eke out a couple more feet of work. (When you paint like I do, with stencils, under pressure, on big pieces, at a certain image density, it becomes a matter of how many feet one can do in a day. I've done enough of these projects that I know what I can manage, and it's remarkably consistent.)

At Tufts I reached new levels of tiredness. I was working well over 12 hours a day, and my feet hurt like crazy- by the third day I had developed such severe pain in one of my feet that I was having trouble putting weight on it. I limped out to accost a construction worker who was working on the building so I could ask him how people managed to stand on ladders all day without messing up their feet. The guy was very informative, and knew exactly what I meant. They wear steel soled boots so that their weight is distributed evenly: I switched my footgear and talked the gallery into loaning me their genie, and I was in much better shape for the rest of the time, but I was tired. The long hours and isolation gave me a boot camp mentality, and I plugged away at the piece as hard as I could every day thinking that it was great that I was learning that I could push myself so much harder than I usually did. By the end of each evening, though, I'd be in this foggy state of battle with my body, wondering if I should stop, if I was getting tired enough to start making mistakes or if I could just will myself to work a little longer. And at that point I'd accidentally stab myself with the exacto knife I use to make my stencils. On the first few days I'd stabbed myself I'd just shouted an echoing curse into the dark hallways and taped the cut up with painters' tape, knowing that there was no one around with bandaids. But as I kept working it started to get funny to me that I managed to cut myself every single day. It wasn't painful or serious, but I'd get so tired I'd reach for the knife without looking, and I'd have to tape up another finger. Eventually I decided that I would go home at first blood.

I finished that project on time and liked it very much, My work is, I think, better bigger. I agreed to do this piece for the airport without hesitation, and was only concerned that having to make the piece only 4' tall would make me too cramped (I usually make things as big as I can- never smaller than 6.5 feet). Given how long it took me to do the Tufts piece, this should have taken me about a week. But having time to think slows me down, and I made things more perfect, and I considered, and I debated each new plot twist in this running narrative. Having plenty of time to make this piece has resulted in a goldfish effect- I did lots of preliminary sketches, cut millions of new stencils, started over a few times, and played with the drawing phase of each section for longer than I ever can on site-specific pieces. It's been great, but it's also meant that I've been thinking my way through this piece in a much more murky way that I do the wall pieces. I've had time to wonder why on earth I'm still telling this story, to worry that I'm not being clear enough, that I'm being too clear, and to think that I should revise my whole way of doing art in the middle of the piece. It's been ridiculously difficult to finish this last section of the work. I never doubted that I would finish on time, but I started working more slowly, not wanting to be done with a project that I've become to feel was a friend- even if it was a friend that had been driving me crazy for months.

It's been great. And somewhere in the middle of it- actually, somewhere right at the beginning of the last section-I had an idea that is going to take me several years of exploration to work out. I'm very excited about it, and although I don't know that it will be immediately obvious to anyone looking at my work, this painting has changed what I'm going to do next in a profound way. It's a funny feeling. While I was working on a piece that was, for much of the time, frustrating because it demanded that I be so consistently attentive to a single narrative structure, I've turned a corner in my work. There's no appearance of this move in the piece- at least, there's a little, but not much. And my new pieces will likely not be so radically different looking from what I already do, but I know that something different has happened with this idea, and it's exciting enough that it will take me to a new place in painting for a couple years. The metaphor is the best way to describe it: the corner I've turned has not driven me off the road, but I can see that I've picked up speed, and it's a long fast road. Yay.

One to go...

I'm done with the third section. I'll post better images one of these days, but in the meantime, here is an image of sections one and two together.