Okay, so it’s true that I seriously believed that nobody would come to the opening, or that a lot of people would come and that they all would think it was terrible. Neither of the above happened! At least as far as I could tell. Whew. I got to meet some new people, and see some old friends, and rode the wave of sleep-deprivation-induced elation until I got back to my house, packed up my stuff, & headed to Worcester for the night. It was pretty great — thanks for coming if you came; if you didn’t/couldn’t, I’ll have pictures up soon, and it’ll stay in the gallery till May 25th.

At the opening, Andrew walked into the back room, with all the sketches, drawings, & scraps pinned up on the walls, and said, “hey, it’s just like Jean’s room!” which was pretty right on. Now that the contents of my walls are all up in the gallery, what to put on the walls of my room?

Other people’s artwork!

The print on the upper left is not other people’s, of course — it’s the Curtis St. apartment print that I just got done for the show. But it’s so new, and it got done so fast, that I feel like I have barely looked at it yet. So there it is. Clockwise from upper left:

57-59 Curtis St, Olneyville, Providence, RI

Jeff Hartford (from western mass, performs as Noise Nomads, his first silkscreen ever)

Jamie Buckmaster (this is one of a series of blockprinted matchboxes which encourage the use of matches as toys, detail is below)

Meg Turner (if she has a website, I can’t find it, but her show is opening at the Woods-Gerry gallery here in Providence this Thursday, May 8th, 6-7:30 pm. The work she will show supposedly includes a 30 foot long drawing of the Providence Fruit & Produce Warehouse. Not to be missed!)

Scøtt Reber (aka noise performer Work/Death. This is the two sides (un-cut or -folded), of the insert for one of the new tapes on Scøtt’s label, Three Songs of Lenin. He’s leaving tonight on a two-week tour of the Northeast, with a bunch of other noise dudes…)

Erik Ruin (philadelphia-based printmaker & shadow puppetteer)

exquisite corpse (new angle-foldy method) by Andrew P & myself…….

I’m glad to have new stuff on the wall.

details:

[Erik & Scøtt]

[me & Jeff]

[Meg & Jamie]

and it’s almost ready.

[The back room/drawing room mess pile. I will document the show & put up some better images — for now, if you want to see any of this in focus, well… you gotta come to the gallery!]

I finished the brand new “57-59 Curtis St.” print at around 4 am — printed a third color on a bunch of copies of the “Ruins” print (aka “Pierre Van Passen Interviews Buenaventura Durruti, Aragon, Spain, 1936″) — washed the ink out of that screen — now to take a shower while it dries. Out of the shower — set up the screen again and print the fourth color. Then — done! and, sleep.

There will be other logistics to think about (for example, it’s raining, so I’ll have to find a ride to get my stash of posters over to the gallery), but if I can get that last color printed and looking all right on at least one copy of the print, I will be happy and feel that my somewhat perverse last-minute determination hasn’t failed me, at least not this time.

Today, Sunday, May 4, 4-7 pm, AS220’s project space (on mathewson, off washington, downtown providence). map & street view here. Come by & see the multiple reasons why I am so darn sleepy right now.

[front gallery, friday, before adjusting the lights, obviously. Stephen’s work is to the left. This is the part that looks like an “art show”… as I guess it’s supposed to? no logic here, sorry, too sleepy!]

Oh and yes, it is 9 am, and yes, I’m still awake!

Yes, despite other people’s good advice and my better judgement, I went ahead and printed postcard invitations for the show on Sunday. These were done a while ago, but I didn’t get to put the picture up until today. It’s good to have something to hand to people. . . . A bunch have already been mailed out and handed out. If you would like to get one in the mail, send me your mailing address!

Buio helps me get the last bunch of drawings and prints ready in time for the show! What a great cat!!!

In actual news, I am indeed trying to finish some last-minute stuff (visible there under the tail). Probably just one, maybe (if I am lucky, and fast) two new small prints. They are about the layout of spaces inside small apartments. In addition to being part of my research for the 2nd print series print (re: privacy & shared space), they (will) tie the architectural drawings in the show together with the more pictorial stuff. I hope.

And why am I paying so much attention to ordinary, crummy, low-rent apartments? Cesare Pavese, quoted in Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, says it for me:

A true revelation, it seems to me, will only emerge from stubborn concentration on a solitary problem. I am not in league with inventors or adventurers, nor with travellers to exotic destinations. The surest — also the quickest — way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.

also:

My hasty measuring of all the work to figure out where it all goes on the wall. I am not very good at putting up art shows, haven’t done it that much, can’t afford to get anything framed right now. . . Stephen and I hung most of the show yesterday, but I ran out of binder clips and am still finishing some stuff… eep. Going back tomorrow with a new box of clips and a clearer sense of what will actually be finished. We also still have to finish putting up the ‘back room’ of the gallery, which is going to be lots of drawings, sketches, and preliminary work.

I went in today to drop off a drawing that had been at my friend’s house, and was surprised by how professional it looks, even in a not-quite-done state. In comparison to the Magic City project, it’s very sparse and “gallery-ish”, and feels empty, too much on the wall, not enough mess. Andrew says “Even though you know the people who run the gallery, it’s still a gallery.” We’ll see how the back room turns out. . . . that might ramp the mess factor up to where I feel comfortable with it. Who knows.

I’ve been printing a lot in the last couple of days. Most of what I was doing was of this nature:

Yes, this Black Cat job is over, despite the hassle that inevitably comes along with trying to print tiny, tiny little details at perfect resolution. I rushed it across town on my bike to Jim, he chopped the edges off the cards on his huge chopping machine (to make the blade come down you have to push two buttons at once, one with each hand, to make sure that you don’t chop a part of yourself off), then rushed it across town again to make it to the shipping company by 7pm. Done and done.

Can you see how tiny those tiny letters are? Smaller than a 16th of an inch. Yes, get out your rulers and look to see how small that is. It’s tiny! Such a thing should not rightfully be printable by screenprinting. Yet it happened, it’s done. Yikes.

(Note: I did not design the above material, it was designed by this fancy, fancy wedding-invitation designer. Their website is impressive, though the opening page is kind of disconcerting. The strange thing I constantly find myself remembering, while in the middle of printing these somewhat excruciatingly detailed and definitely high-luxury “unnecessary” objects, is that, despite whatever one might say about the convention of marriage and the ‘wedding industry’ in general — a wedding invitation is one of the few pieces of art or design that will actually have meaning for many people: personal, intimate, significant meaning. So — not completely unnecessary. . .)

[my printing studio. tool shelves and drawers near left. new printing table in the center, with Scøtt’s rolly cart in front to hold paper. right: homemade drying rack (the shelves pull out, it’s sweet), with light table on top (covered by black cloth & plywood). back: pile of junk. this is all in the former kitchen of an attic apartment: note corner of kitchen sink/counter at left]

So my friday-saturday-and-monday of printing a bunch of high-precision, long-hours print runs left me with some longstanding questions newly affirmed in my mind.

1) I need to not lock my knees when pulling a print. I kind of realized I was doing this, but now that I have finally built myself a new printing table (above) that is a) not wobbly and b) four inches higher than the old one (more-or-less the right height!), it has become imperative. In the middle of the first print run of the weekend (which was also the first on the new table) I tried to sit down to take a break, and yelled because I had totally strained my knees from not bending them forward with every pull… The rest of the weekend became a practice session for careful attention to non-locked-knees standing and print-pulling. A no-brainer — but it’s hard to change long-held physical habits…

2) I need to wear a respirator while printing. This should also be a no-brainer, I guess, but it took me a while. I’ve been noticing a weird itch in the back of my throat whenever I printed for a while now, and after I realized that I wasn’t just “starting to feel a sore throat coming on”, had begun to harbor (somewhat reluctantly) the idea that there was probably a connection.

The labels on the Speedball inks I use say they are non-toxic, so I had always thought that I must be wrong. However, yesterday, as I finished a five-hour, non-stop print run (pulling somewhere around 500 prints in that time!), my throat really hurt, and my lips felt tingly (and yes, I had the windows open, and no, I’m not licking the squeegee, or anything like that). Today, the croaky throat was still there, and by the afternoon, the tingly numbness in my lips had spread to the lower right side of my chin & face. BAD. ! ! ! So I looked up the MSDS.

It affirms the product’s supposed non-toxicity, and says this:

but it also says this:

1 pound per gallon is about an eighth of a gallon, which seems to me to be quite a lot. I guess I am just the one-out-of-however-many people that has a bad reaction to it. My housemate B has an extra respirator that I can use, and he already has the Organics cartridges (in his puppetmaking, he uses a lot of terrible spray glue to stick terrible foam together — which is obviously toxic, in contrast to this stuff I have been using for years…).

So I will start using it tomorrow and see how it goes. I’m kind of hoping the weird numbness goes away first . . . It’s a depressing reminder of just how long it’s been since I’ve been to the dentist.

[. . . I set up the next print run tonight, so I can print tomorrow, since I still want to have the windows open, and tonight it’s too cold for that . . . ]

The Forbes St. kitchen is not finished, but of course it is constantly in use, every day. For example: Nick and Max working together on house dinner.

The food was as good as it looks. (note the spice rack in the background — more or less finished!)

Max talks about plans for a folding desk in his room. (Laptop = recipe source)

secret door projects does NOT recommend: hanging cliplights from the kitchen ceiling, plugged in to extension cords (which are precariously stretched out along the ceiling, above the ceiling fan), that are plugged in turn into a surge protector that is loosely attached to the wall, by the switch of which you can turn the hanging lights on and off. Such a solution must only be implemented on a temporary or “mock-up” basis, and as we know, building codes disallow the use of extension cords in any situation.

HOWEVER such cliplights do give really nice direct illumination to work by, and make said kitchen really warm and cozy, as seen in these somewhat fuzzy pictures — and when we will get around to actually re-doing the lighting in here is anybody’s guess.

A trip with Scøtt in the van to a creepily perfect still-almost-brand-new shopping plaza in Smithfield RI, a visit to the giant chain home improvement store, twenty-three dollars spent, some cutting with the knife, and a little time with the white paint =

new homasote boards for pinning stuff up on!

I have been making notes on small cards and laying them out to think about how things are related. This probably traces back somehow to witnessing some of my friend James McShane’s comic-making practice, in which he works on narrative sequences the same way, as a deck of card/pages that can be ordered & re-ordered.

Laid out on my desk, whatever arrangement the cards are in is bound to get destroyed in less than a day (since I’m also using the computer, reading & taking notes on books, trying to do my taxes, organizing stuff I pull out of my backpack when I come home, etc, all on the same desk). The pinboard solves that problem. Also it lets me look at many things at once, keep many ideas up in front of my eyes, and thus in front of my ever-distractable mind.

Having more pinboards also makes my room into even more of an art-making nest. It’s pretty tiny (about 8 feet by 10 feet), with flatfile storage, bed, clothes, giant 4 foot by 4 foot drawing desk, many shelves, cat litterbox, etc. fitted in on multiple levels. The pin-up boards definitely are kind of tipping the scales towards “work” and away from “other life”. wait, is there such a thing as “other life”?

More cards, with images instead of text, are probably going to be in evidence soon. There’s a drawing of them already, but I need to be able to move them around & rearrange. The second print looks like it’s going to be some kind of catalog or chart of various different ways doors, walls, corridors, windows, stairs etc. can create different degrees of privacy between personal spaces and shared spaces. At least that will be one of the things that is happening in it… My tenuous prediction/hope is that it will be some kind of cross between the rigor of an Edward Tufte diagram, and the nonsense-within-order of a Bernard Tschumi drawing for the Parc De La Villette in Paris. Plus some perspective drawings. In awesome colors. WHO KNOWS.

This stuff happened about a week ago, it just takes me a while to record things and write about them. The non-internet comes first.

Reading:

• The Social Psychology of Privacy, a 1968 essay by Barry Schwartz, which was a standout in Robert Gutman’s 1972 anthology People and Buildings, dealing with the implications of sociology on architecture. In general, pretty interesting and relevant, even in its datedness.
• Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity, by Catherine Ingraham, 1998.
• A Hut of One’s Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture, by Ann Cline, also 1998.

The late-90s critical theory and the late-60s sociology provide a really good counterpoint to each other. Like Fanta and cheap red wine. I mean it!

From sketch…

…. to full-size mockup with letters!

There’s actually way more done than this by now, these pictures are from last Monday night (March 24). The letters are totally hand-drawn, no tracing! but I used a computer to print out sample text to get the letters to fit more-or-less right in their space, and to get the kerning (the spacing between each letter) roughly in place. After I had figured out most of the letterforms (drawing them as I went along in the “Providence & Pawtucket” text at the top), I started adjusting the kerning on the paper as I drew… since the computer kerning wasn’t always right. The tall letters, diagonal slant, and tight fit of the central text made it necessary to really adjust each space by eye, squinting at the negative space between the letters, trying to feel out how much breathing room they have… sketching, looking, erasing, redrawing the letter a 16th or a 32nd of an inch over — etc. It sounds maddening, right? but I have done it so many times now that I have a feel for it, and I haven’t done it in a while, so it was relaxing, falling back into old ways, an understandable task.

I’m going to try to post images of this project through to its completion — I’ve mostly put up process work so far, and if you’ve read some of the earlier posts, you may be wondering, “does anything ever get finished?” It does, but I think that after I’m done with things, I’m less excited about them than I am in the middle of the process. Also, since most of them are posters, or multiples of some kind, people see the final product… but the process tends to go unseen…

secret door work & livelihood update:

I occasionally do some screenprinting work for a local offset printer, Black Cat Graphics. They call me when they need a light-colored ink printed on dark-colored envelopes — the one thing their processes and techniques can’t pull off. (The jobs tend to be really fancy wedding invitations designed by a swanky place in New York… but luckily all only one color.) Right now, I’m in the middle of trying to be super hard-working and organized to get the second series print (about private space & shared space) done for my show in May. It’s been going well so far, even though there have been some major exceptions of space-out time — mostly I’ve been very productive & pretty organized and staying focused and on-task.

Black Cat called me up at the beginning of the week to ask if I wanted to do a large screenprinting job — more than twice as many things as I’ve printed for them before, more than twice as much money. The envelope printing will be demanding, but straightforward — lots of small details and fine lines, but I’ve ironed out (most of) those kinks in the last couple of jobs I have done for them. (Part of the reason I like working for BC is that J—, the proprietor, is as picky about quality & detail as I am, maybe more so…) It will take some time, because of the large number of pulls, and that will be time taken away from me getting the print done… it might even mean it’s not totally ready…so I initially was going to say no. I realized that, though, having the extra money will mean that I won’t have to be stressed out about money by the time of the show itself, and that I won’t be worrying about whether I sell anything or how much I sell, won’t have to let money affect how I approach the whole situation — at least not any more than it already affects any situation… So, seen in the light of that trade-off, absolutely worth it. I decided to take on the job…

and. . . I’ve definitely hung up half-finished work before . . .

Last Sunday, and another Sunday a couple of weeks before that, M— & I got up early(ish) and met up to go visit the old fruit & produce warehouse on Harris Ave. It’s being torn down, “legally”, in the same way that all demolitions of historic buildings in Providence are legal. Art In Ruins has the whole story, more links, many photographs, and comments from various people. Here’s the ’street view’ of it from last year, though who knows how long that link will last…

The demolition of this building is a shame and a crime. Along with a couple of way-too-large, brightly-lit branding/signs on redevelopment projects, golden retrievers being walked up & down Broadway, and the city’s Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism (yup, those all belong together, folks!), it is one more reason on my list of reasons to leave Providence (which somehow hasn’t gotten long enough yet to a point where I actually leave…).

(image from Art In Ruins!)

When we were there on Sunday, I brought a measuring tape and went around measuring some of the construction details. When the warehouse was originally built, it was 965 feet long (about 100 of those feet were shorn off in 1998 when they built the Rt. 95/Rt. 6 & 10 interchange, which was also when the warehouse was finally closed). Though functional and utilitarian, and built on a massive scale to accommodate the trains and trucks that would pull up next to its loading docks, the building is clearly designed to be used by humans, at a human scale. It was a distribution center for fruits & vegetables, and though the building itself was huge, many small produce companies rented two or three or five of its 15-foot bays, and all had the same connection to the same regional/interstate network. Deep rigid awnings covered the docks to protect people and produce from the weather, but the first floor ceiling was extra-high to make room for a wide window above the awnings (seen in the photo above) which would light the spaces in which the workers spent their time. Compare with modern distribution centers — I couldn’t readily find an image of a really huge one, but you’ve seen them all over the countryside — there’s a massive BJ’s warehouse on Rt. 146 between here and Worcester if you need an example.

The basic function is the same (loading docks, trucks pull up, stuff comes in, stuff goes out) but any kind of details or proportions that would give the building dignity, rhythm, or identity has been cost-adjusted out of the plans — except for that nice white stripe. Natural light is dispensed with (making and maintaining a window is more expensive than making a wall, plus the building is easier to climate-control). The location (somewhere outside of the city) and the ownership structure (centrally owned and operated) both dictate that each warehouse will be accessed and used by one company only — the larger the company, the cheaper their costs will be, the huger a warehouse they can build, the larger a share of the regional economy they can control. The old Providence fruit & produce warehouse was significant not just because it was ‘historic’, and beautiful not only in its decay: from its beginning, it was a structure that fostered a different way of doing business — small-scale instead of massive, local-connected-to-regional instead of national-dominating-local, concerned with human life and experience, instead of concerned with spending less money. It was built by a city that had as its aim fostering better access to food and better business and work opportunities for its citizens — not by a company interested in increasing its market share and profits. All these things are not only political or idealistic: they were, from the start, built into the structure and the proportions of the building itself.

I was interested in paying some closer attention to some of these dimensions and details: what was left, at least. Drawing is pretty much the best way for me to give something my extended attention, comprehend the details, and make sense of connections between different things. Photos are helpful as reference after the fact, especially when time is limited, but the process of making a drawing is crucial to actually understanding something. M— is working on an epic drawing (which is probably going to be about 30 feet long!) of the entire length of the building, so she was also looking for details (of the rubble, as well as of the structure…). On Sunday, only three of the building’s 71 bays were left, and the last remaining cast-iron staircase had been pulled down out of its opening, so we had no way to go up to the second floor (besides a risky climb up a rubble-filled elevator shaft…). Most of the measurements of the upper floor could be inferred up from the facade at the ground floor, or counted off from the regular dimensions of the cinderblocks in the wall that had been built to close off the shortened end (at right in the photo below).

However, we were getting all nerdy and attempting to figure out the dimension of the bricks which were used to fill in the lower part of the walls on the second floor. We found some bricks sitting around the rubble, and measured those, and the widths of the mortar that remained attached to them… but then realized that they were the not the same bricks, but instead were bricks from the elevator shacks that had sat on top of the roof, and were (may have been?) added later… thus probably had a slightly different dimension. (They had a different texture, were a different color, and also most of them were hollow inside.) We scouted around for some of the other bricks on the ground, and found one big chunk, but the side facing up was the inside of the wall (much less even in spacing and mortaring than the outside), and it was too heavy to turn over. As I was trying to measure it, the cops pulled up and we decided to cheese it (of course, at an extremely leisurely and relaxed pace).

Well, tonight, Scøtt and I went back, at around 5 am (still too dark to take decent pictures) and found only one bay of the building remaining. The second floor of the second-to-last bay was falling down at a slope… and underneath it, sitting on the rubble pile, below a broken piece of concrete dangling precariously by a couple of strands of rebar… a large section of the 2nd floor bricks that we had wanted to measure.

• length: 8″
• length with mortar: 8 1/4″ to 8 1/2″
• height: 2 1/4″
• height of horizontal mortar strip: 3/4″
• so, height of brick course including mortar: 3″

goodbye, building.

Here are the rest of my measurements from last Sunday.

I printed a whole bunch of these “kitchen kits” over the past week. The kitchen in question is, of course, the kitchen at Forbes St. — and these were made specifically for the residents of that house to cut apart and put back together as they choose. (The prints will also be a ‘bonus print’ for print series subscribers, and some will be floating around at my show ! in May.) Making a screenprint with parts that you can cut out & paste together (definitely inspired/spurred on by Jung Il Hong & Brian Chippendale’s silkscreen work in this realm, as well as Meredith Stern’s linocuts) was something I’d wanted to do for a long time, and this doesn’t totally fulfill that need, but it’s a start.

It’s also a start in experimenting with how to give people the tools to make drawings, without making them go through 5 years of architecture school training. An architectural drawing is a great way to communicate and transmit information, and even to facilitate a conversation about ideas for space, but access to that medium has always been limited by technology or specialized skills (even in the pre-computer era). How to communicate about design? How to make a tool that people can both use in group discussions, and take back to their rooms and mess around with on their own? How can we have a conversation that will produce a physical artifact that everyone present has had a chance to modify, that can be referred to in the future as evidence of the process or the decision? How to avoid being, once again, the one in the middle of the room holding the only pencil?

So, the kitchen kits are in the classic poster tradition of ‘large expendable multiples’, as well as in the classic dungeons & dragons tradition of ‘a gridded space over which creatures can move and adventures are had, facilitated by the imagination’. After getting done with the printing (and then sleeping) I kind of couldn’t keep my hands off of it and spent yesterday cutting them up & making a couple of different versions of the Forbes kitchen (past, present, possible future). It was a lot of fun. I had had doubts about the grid (which is 6" squares at the 1/2 inch = 1 foot scale), but in the end it functions pretty well as both a ground to denote what is the interior space of the kitchen, and as a instant measurement device: “wait, only 2 feet between this counter and the wall…. that’s not enough for someone to walk through!”, etc. (To all my architecture professors: Yes, it has the scale on it… you can also cut out the graphic scale and use it to measure things on the drawing!)

This, and hopefully more playful, game-like print/building projects to come, are inspired both by game designers like Jane McGonigal (whose work I barely understand but am pretty excited about), and by the book Housing Without Houses, by Nabeel Hamdi.

Here Hamdi talks about trying to make buildings which involve the users in their creation:

If the setting these buildings provided was to be an invitation to users to participate in creating an architecture of cooperation — a concept only primitively explored in the days of flexible buildings — then the size, position, and organization of space and materials would also have to perform in more than technically rational ways. They had to reference the choices available, promoting spontaneity and discovery, albeit within the constraints of the materials and systems employed and the legal and regulatory structure. The architecture of possibilities, in other words, would need to be legible and opportunistic, and yet remain technically rational.

Housing Without Houses, p.73

“Okay, roll the 20-sided die to see how much resistance you get from Code Enforcement….”

The Forbes kids get their hands on the kits this weekend, we’ll see what they do with them…

sticky-paper sheets printed from the same screens will also become coffee-cup stickers for my friend’s travelling espresso machine coffee shop…. yeah!