Stuff

Late last year while visiting a friend in New jersey, we decided to go to the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), which was reopening that day. While we were there, we went to an open studio session of ceramics artist Zack Davis. A project he was working on at the time was to make several ceramic pots of sizes just large enough so that they would fit in a briefcase. Once the briefcase was full - these ceramic pots were still wet, not fired up - he would close it and take it wherever he went. This led to interesting and random interaction between the various objects in the briefcase. By the end of it - when the artist thought they were ready - these individual objects would have combined into a single object. One could still notice the shapes of the individual pots, but they were fused together. At that time I found it interesting, but wasn't sure how I was to think of it - an artist letting randomness play such a large role in his creation.

But then recently watching some documentaries of artists in the American Masters series, some of these things made sense. An artist is also a person who just enjoys creating stuff. Some might want to control how that stuff gets made up, but there are also those who are interested in the process, and they are content to go wherever the process leads them. Jackson Pollock was a believer in the latter (I think). And Zack Davis seems to be an artist in the same mould.

Now again a flashback to two years ago - I was visiting Washington DC with a few friends to see some museums. One of my friends had a GPS system that charted our route on a map, while we were driving. DC being such a strange city in terms of it's roads, we got lost (I was responsible for getting us lost :-)- several times. Trying to find our way we drove on several circuitous and not so circuitous routes. The GPS meanwhile charted all of that on the map, and the charted route was turning into something really interesting. We were creating a piece of "abstract art" just by driving around :-). I remarked that to my friends. But we didn't store that, and I soon forgot about that. But then a couple of days ago, mostly being inspired by the documentaries I was seeing (the latest one was about Alexander Calder) and what I'd seen of Zack Davis' work, I thought of trying something out.

So I took a large packing carton, bought some markers, and some sketching paper large enough to fit in the box. I then tied strings to the markers (I tried two colors - black and red) and hung them to the lid of the carton, with just enough string so that their tips touched the sketching paper at the bottom. I then put this carton in my car and drove to the downtown area, spent a bit of time there and then drove back home, all the time the markers in contact with the sheet. While the car was parked, the ink botted the paper, with the size of the blot proportional to the time it was stationary. And while I was driving the markers sketched lines and curves that were in a way controlled by the speed of the car, changing of lanes, turns that I took and so on and so forth. Of course this is (for me) very experimental. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to setup the markers so that they have free movement and are not constrained by anything other than the sides of the carton itself. Like everything else in this world, I'm quite sure someone has done this before. But it was fun trying this out for myself. So here it is, my first attempt called "To Hyperion and back" :-):