Tuesday the 10th

I was admitted to MSK urgent care back in Jan around the 13th.  I was severely dehydrated and felt horrible.  The Dr. had suggested that I check myself in the night before but I wanted to take care of some important paper work, like my Health Care Proxy and Living Will. 

One of the symptoms of my cancer is the narrowing of the esophagus and in my case it completely shut down to a tiny passage, so small and constricted that even taking in liquids, like that pesky thing 'water', became impossible.  Do deal with this problem, it had been predetermined that I would have a 'shunt' put in my esophagus, this is an expandable pipe of sorts to force open the constricted passage and allow the intake of necessary nutrition and liquids.   The only problem, it was scheduled a week and a half ahead of my admittance, I would not live that long if I had to wait.  When I was in urgent care it was decided that installing one would be the first course of business and the following day after entrance I was brought down for surgery at the end of the day.

Not five minutes before I was wheeled into surgery I received a call, my son had just dislocated his right shoulder in a wrestling match.   Nothing like added anxiety and worry.   I was wheeled out of surgery feeling like shite.  I spent nearly the next 24 to 48 hours vomiting blood, I frankly don't remember the total time span.   The shunt was removed, I don't even remember being taken down for that procedure.

A day later a feeding tube was installed, I've been using it ever since.  

Two in the morning

And I am awake.  It's been like this in one way or another it seems for sometime now.  My body clock being off from the waking world.  But then, that is not really surprising as my body has been out of sync for some months now in a most obvious way.

It became self apparent to me when summer vacation had ended, the new school year had start, the weather was just beginning to fall and the weather was a minor tingle on some mornings.  I felt a tightness in my chest, a small hollow and minor burning spot directly beneath my sternum.  Turned out it wasn't GERD or acid reflux disease as I first thought.

No, several months of slowly losing weight and then it getting to the point where I could not swallow food nor drink around Christmas made it apparent that something more serious was amiss. By the high holidays and the results beginning to come in from several tests proving several tumors were obstructing my esophageal pathway and my stomach, cancer was suspected and confirmed.

If you are reading this blog, it is most likely because I have invited you here to keep abreast of my health and situation, as it were.   I have had so many people reach out to me, that the sheer number makes it impossible for me to address each one individually as I would like, more importantly, the fact is, my energy levels are so intermittent during the day that often during daylight hours I have neither the strength nor capacity to carry on a conversation, whereas at 2 in the morning and all asleep save but me.

So, stay tuned.   I will try to catch everyone up in the coming days on the activities since Christmas and up to my current condition ASAP.

In short, I am ok, have gone through my first bout of chemo, am eating (if you call feeding tube nutrition eating), the pain is overall manageable and I feel optimistic.   And, thank you for caring and letting me know your thoughts, prayers, etc., it has meant more to me than you know.

Optics and Perception- introduction

It has been past 6 months since I’ve ‘published’ anything on this blog and for good reason.  I have transitioned completely out of the art services industry in which I was scrapping by and am now conducting scientific research in the relatively new field of Adaptive Optics on the retina.

Adaptive Optics is not a new scientific technique, it’s been used in astronomy for many years but it is new in Retinal Research.  By using an infrared laser we can scan the retina and see the cone density and structure of the eye, my job is to acquire these scans but also to determine how the variety of images I take relate to the other imaging devices currently in use and confer with the Ophthalmologists and the device makers in how to improve and develop this technology in a diagnostic setting and the final interpretive analysis.

As an artist who has a hard science background, having studied biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in university before I took a break and switched to art the transition has actually been incredibly smooth and the job is, well fantastic.

One of the great pleasures has been meeting and talking with some of the top Ophthalmologists, neuro scientists and physicists in the field but more importantly are the exciting conversations that have ensued about perception and reality, language and reality and sometimes and not too infrequently metaphysics.

The perceptual consciousness of vision in hindsight has always been a strong theme in my work and looking back at some of my ‘gestural works’ I can see that the various lines that have come through my paintings are related to the blood vessels and nerve fiber nets in an odd way, although this is really applying a reading or interpretation after the fact, no fuzzy metaphysics here, just happy accident or coincidence. 

More to come- as I have written a few things in relation to Henri Art Magazine that I feel are pertinent counter points and additions.

Occupy This

A trenchant analysis well worth reading for how Occupy failed, from the Baffler and Thomas Frank-

To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice …and drove it absolutely crazy

Carol nails it.

Carol Diehl's Art Vent is one of my regular reads and she nails it on this one.

Gone Fishing

Obvious that I've dropped off the radar.   Things coming to a crashing thud.   More, I just don't care about "art" anymore.   This article that I ran across today encapsulates my feelings of sorts, Occupy Art.

The thing is, I will continue to make things but these things will not go out into the art world or market because frankly, I don't care to participate in a circus that degrades something that I hold as an important personal practice.   Since it will not be seen, it will not participate in a larger dialogue of art, the tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear the sound.   

And I am not saddened or upset about this as I once might have been.  Just another stage of life and life is too short to spend chasing dreams that revolve around being accepted and having work collected by people that I have nothing but disgust and contempt for, not that anyone is banging down the door by any means but...

My studio building was flooded by Sandy and closed for over three weeks, during the night of the storm I had a dream of the studio burning down and losing over 20 years of work.  I awoke after the dream and felt a relief to have it gone, done and over and then realized it was nothing but a dream.

There is something liberating and freeing in all of this.  The things I am making having nothing to do with art and the critical, historical values that played a part of my mindset and dialogue are in the dust heap also.  

I cannot explain the feeling that came over me this summer but it was final.  It might upset a few of my closer friends but I cannot and do not want to discuss art ever again.   Art is dead.

That dirty old bastard

 I love Picasso.   Not because he was a celebrity when I was a child, between Warhol and Picasso, the two…

I love Picasso’s late work, its abrasiveness, its brashness, its playfulness and in the end despite everything being so garish, it works, it works for me.   It excites me, it thrills me, it puzzles me, it sits on my mind.  

I am writing this in response to Mark at Henrimag and Paul from Paulcorio and the mysterious Anonymous who some of us know quite well not only because of his pertinent commentary but also because we’ve spent many nights and days talking about art and getting drunk both literally and figuratively.

I have a problem with Modernism and hence Post-Modernism.  To me they are interesting theories of cultural production and arts placement in culture at large.

The problem with Picasso or Miró for that matter is that they don’t fit into convenient categories of modernist art production, nor does Duchamp for that matter.   The American version of Modernism has Clem Greenberg’s shadow still haunting it, at least for someone of my age and generation, because we or I, was over-steeped in it from schooling.   The conceptual and minimal works that came out of it owe more than a passing debt to Clem, even if as reaction.   Not surprising too because painting as an “avant-garde” practice was pretty much exhausted by 1920 and the rest since, mining familiar territories.   

By 1920 cubism had morphed into synthetic cubism, Matisse had gone to Nice and began riffing on Cezanne and his own work, now that I think of it, the proto-Soviets were the ones who radicalized vision along with the Dutch.   By 1920 Malevich and Rodchenko had along with the De Stijl group of Mondrian et al had given the non-objective a face and their work in particular was one of revolutionary import, they were radicals who desired to shape and change culture through their art.  The French and I include Picasso and Miró in this, not so much, I mean what’s wrong with Café culture?

Listen I don’t want to delve into some deeper analysis but my feeling and my head tell me that what is dead, is not so much the avant-garde or modernism or post-modernism because they were never alive to begin with, they are nothing more than anthropomorphic descriptions of historical processes, made by man for man in an attempt to understand and come to grips with the working processes of other people coming to grips with themselves through their work within certain time frames that at once shaped and defined them and then they tried to break through those limitations, limitations put on by the expectations at large and the ones that they had imposed on themselves and of major importance but rarely discussed is the death of god and the poetic, what is dead is what was never alive, a theory or theories.

What the various artists had in common despite the incredible variety of visual expression was each artist was trying to come to grips with the ghost of art and the substrate in which it can be hung within.   The various stories or myths that each artist had, whether it was Duchamp and the fourth dimension and more and the eros that many rarely talk about but he hinted at consistently Rrose Sélavy, Mondrian’s Theosophy, the relationship between Constructivism and Russian Icon painting, Picasso with the history of art and Matisse with the arcadian joie de vivre.

Their art was an art born out of life, not naïve life (maybe at times) but also a love of art. 

Today’s art gymnastics, the kind that fills us with dread is the post-mortem, cynical market place driven drivel.  One, driven by an academy of dead wood and no better than the church in trying to force an ideal or idea of what it is without the love or poetry, two concepts too fuzzy and akin to ‘feeling.’

The problem with theory is that it takes place in words, don’t get me wrong I love words, look ma, I’m using them now but the best wordsmiths and the best painters artists etc know when they are having fun with their media in trying to expand the field of expression not for the accolades but because they or we are trying to find the best way to relay or transmit this weird feeling or idea that we have about the world to someone else.

We don’t make art to fit the academy or the school, October or Artforum, MoMA or the New Museum.   That is where art goes to die, stuffed and on the wall.   This was the point, by the great and greatly misunderstood Marcel Broodthaers.

Oh and Picasso, I’ll try to get back to him shortly as I started writing something but got sidetracked by life.