James Bouler: My Muse

From 2009 to 2011, I have been tearing through ideas and activities at a breakneck speed.  In fact, I once told someone I felt like a hamster on a wheel, on fire.  Let's just say that mindset isn't the best for making art.  My mind was both tangled like spaghetti and yet void of anything creative.
Sensing a momentary break in the action, Louise Millmann turned to me and said, "Time to get back in the studio."  OK, sounds good, but what to say?  After a few abstract watercolors, just to see color and texture again, I had my inspiration:  James Bouler's 50th Birthday.

I've dabbled in collage over the years, usually to generate ideas for paintings, but with James facing a milestone, his life gave me inspiration. It started in Photoshop, using old photos to make invitations and signs for an upcoming celebration.  Once the ideas started, it was time to work with tactile objects. Using a map of Alabama for the first image, I pulled in an old photo, text, and geography, trying to create a poem about his youth in the South.  With Ray Johnson's film, How To Draw A Bunny playing in the background for inspiration, Jackson helped me cut and glue the pieces in place.  We moved on to the target, with a man and his son planting seeds-- a metaphor for James in so many ways-- with his younger self running into the collage.  The text, a piece by Kierkegaard about the lives we lead and our spiritual goals, seemed a perfect fit to our 'target'-- a life well-lived.

Ray's Boxes

For those of you following this blog regularly, you are well aware of artist Ray Johnson's use of the postal system as part of his art performance. The act of mailing art and having it arrive on the doorstep of a lucky recipient was the key to his NY Correspondence School. And it wasn't just artwork that was often sent. Boxes filled with odds and ends from junk drawers, postcards, tennis balls, bric-a-brack were sent to special friends-- somewhat like receiving a Joseph Cornell piece in a cardboard box. Last week at Esopus in NYC, collagist Bob Warner shared with the viewing public the three boxes he had received from Ray before Ray's death in 1995. By unpacking, and then repacking the boxes, Warner resurrected Ray's ability to turn even the simplest, everyday act into a full-blown performance art piece.
photo by Louise Millmann, film by Nicholas Maravell

ABAD: The Ties that Bind

An homage to the ultimate unknown artist, Ray Johnson among others. Check out the other entries for the upcoming show.

Ties That Bind: A New ABAD Exhibition

Here are my sketches for the upcoming A Book About Death exhibition. With tornadoes racing across the United States, including a warning tonight for the metropolitan NY area, the topic of 'The Ties that Bind' seem ominously connected to our environment.

ABAD Protest

The CW Post installment of A Book About Death exhibition had a great turnout at the opening event. Honey Millmann and I protested Nothing at the event as an homage to Ray Johnson's own protest of his exhibition at the Nassau County Museum of Art, just down the road from CW Post. The exhibition featured work from the original ABAD exhibition, as well as many new entries from around the world, unified in their belief that art should be shared as often as possible. The exhibition will only be up for fie days, so if you want to check it out in person, do it quickly. Otherwise you will have to content yourself with Viv Maudlin's film about the exhibition.

ABAD Exhibition: CW Post, Long Island

Viv Maudlin reviews the Book About Death exhibition at CW Post. Opening today at 5 pm.

ABAD Idea

As 'A Book About Death' postcard homages to Ray Johnson pop up around the globe, the sharing of ideas reminds me of the recent explosion of TEDx conferences. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is a lecture series that centers around the theme of ideas worth spreading. LIke the artistic 'think-tank' ABAD has inspired, TEDx is able to take on its own local persona while retaining the integrity of the overall concept. Although ideas are shared not unlike the interconnectedness of Facebook and Twitter, there is something inherently different about ABAD and TED's viral nature. Instead of being trapped behind the electronic screen, it's the physicality of ideas being exchanged in a space, a gallery, a conference center, a university, which transforms participants-- presenters and audience alike. WIth this in mind, please do drop by CW Post University Gallery for the upcoming ABAD exhibition which opens at 5 pm on Wednesday, November 3rd. As artist Louise Millman would say, it's ABAD idea.

A Book About Death: Palumbo Picasso

Only Louise Millmann could rope me into a performance piece. The latest A Book About Death Exhibition installment will be at CW Post University's gallery, in November and my submission is in the mail today. The opening on November 3rd, will include performance pieces as a tribute to Ray Johnson's work as a conceptual and performance artist. Johnson, whose 'happenings' were actually called 'nothings', staged everything from ladder carrying, clothing cutting parties, art protests, and fan club meetings as part of his performances, but it was his 'foot-long' hot dog drop over Long Island that captured our fancy. Millmann's dramatic alter-ego Viv Maudlin, is at the ready to serve up a creative event, so it was time for me to introduce Palumbo Picasso, my riff on Paloma, whom Johnson deified through the Paloma Picasso Fan Club and incorporated into many of his portraits. As to what Maudlin and Picasso do, you'll just have to show up and find out.

Diner a la C'arte

What had been a self portrait became a hot dog. I'm ok with that.
Actually I'm happy about that. In an open call for postcard-sized art dealing with food, Diner a la C'arte, in France, the bastion of cuisine no less, I was stumped for days. Then I remembered Ray Johnson's foot long drop over Long Island, a performance piece were Johnson rented a helicopter on his gallery's tab, and dropped foot-long hot dogs to the waiting crowd below. Off my collage goes airmail to France, and as they say, 'bon appetit.'

Studio Time

Finally I found myself with enough time and concentration to finish some work I started before Olivia's fundraiser. It's hard to believe that these bird images were started before the fundraiser. The top painting, Bird House, is for the upcoming December show at Ripe Art Gallery, where collage artist Louise Millmann and I will share the space since most of our friends are the same anyhow. The two collages below are for postcard exhibitions-- the Seatuck fundraiser in September and the Book About Death show at CW Post in Brookville, NY in October.

A Book About Death: CW Post

Pop artist Ray Johnson is best known for being unknown. A man who dons a placard and boycotts his own one-man show, who uses the postal service as performance art, and who creates complex collages with inconic references and inside jokes, Ray Johnson's art career entwined visual and conceptual art with theater. That's me with him in the second photo in 1984, at a 'cutting party' where he cut the layers of clothes off of people for artistic effect. He dropped hot dogs from helicopters, walked on a roof with a ladder, even his death, a suicide in the waters of Sag Harbor, had all the makings of a Ray Johnson performance.
One of Johnson's pieces was the creation of an unbound book called A Book About Death, where his postcard-sized images addressed the topic of death in his usual mix of truth and irony. To honor his legacy, artist and curator Matthew Rose and a band of fantastically creative folks have hosted A Book About Death postcard exhibitions around the globe, an open call for images borrowing Johnson's theme and format.
There is a new open call for work to be submitted for an upcoming ABAD exhibition at CW Post in Brookville, Long Island, a stone's throw from Ray Johnson's residence in Locust Valley. The deadline is October 15th, so you've got some time to break out your paints, your scissors, and your pencils and enter a work of your own. Click here for details.

ABAD: Omaha Submission

Here is my collage submission for the Book About Death show in Omaha. My piece, a tribute to conceptual artist Ray Johnson, refers to the artist's 1995 death off the coast of Sag Harbor, NY. Johnson, who was 67 at the time, was a strong believer in numerology and ended his life by swimming the backstroke out to the Atlantic Ocean on January 13th.

The Importance of Being A Curator

According to Joseph Campbell, you can tell what a culture values by its largest building. The Pharaoh wanted a big tomb, so Ancient Egypt is defined by the pyramid. The Middle Ages brings the rise of the cathedral. France has Versailles. And the United States? The mall. The same holds true for the history of art. The market oftentime prevails and what sells determines what gets created.

If the patron directs architecture and art with funding, it is the modern-day curator who sets the standard. Curators hit celeb status with the rise of contemporary art. Gallery owners Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Mary Boone became all-powerful in shaping the NYC art scene, but it was Philippe Montebello who established the bar for high culture with his 30 year tenure as director of the Metropolitan Museum. His modern art counterpart, curator Henry Geldzahler, seen here with me in 1984 at a show he curated at PS 1 in Queens, NY, was part of the Metropolitan's goal of adding contemporary art to their collection, joining their curatorial staff in 1960 at the age of 24. Over the next twenty-five years, with the weight of the Metropolitan Museum's name behind him, Geldzahler's choices of what would grace gallery walls would serve as a primer on late 20th century art. Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, David Hockney-- Geldzahler determined the who's who of the era, but the real question is who was left out?

Weekend Studio Time

Sometimes I need a healthy dose of quiet to think about art. This weekend I was able to clear the deck for that time. The first piece is a collage sketch for the Angry Landscape series, more appropriate today then when I first came up with the idea a couple of months ago. I looked at the Great Wave, a Japanese woodblock print by Hokusai from 1831 and combined it with a drawing I had done of Verace last year. The second piece is a watercolor that reminds me of the 1960's film The Fantastic Voyage, where scientists are reduced to microscopic proportions to enter the human body. Finally, I took a good look at some Ray Johnson images before creating a poster for the Book About Death show in Omaha. Johnson often reduced portraits of artworld insiders into bunnies or profiles, so I 'Johnson-ified' curators Millmann and Gilmer as part of my tribute to Johnson himself.

A Book About Death: Omaha

Photographers Louise Millmann and Rob Gilmer are calling for postcard sized entries for the latest installment in the Book About Death series. With stops in NYC, Belgium, Wales, and Brazil, this homage to conceptual mail artist Ray Johnson continues to morph. To participate, create a postcard sized image, including the words 'Book About Death' on the front, and mail it off to RNG Gallery, 1915 Leavenworth Stree, Omaha, Nebraska 68102.

Portrait of the Artist

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along he road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. James Joyce begins his autobiographical novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with this recount of a childhood experience. From there, the complexity of the writing style grows, mirroring the intellectual and artistic development of Joyce as a writer.
Digging through a moldy box of old photographs last night, I unearthed bits and pieces of my own artistic development. From a daily journal to postcards, I gleaned moments of my early and awkward attempts as self expression until a more reasonably formed image of myself began to emerge. The top photograph taken by none other than Louise Millmann is of my box of oil paints in 1984. I swear I still have some of those paints in the back of my supply cupboard, including that cigar box. When it comes to paint, I border on a Depression-era mentality of squeezing out every last drop of precious pigment. In those days, I painted much larger than today, with raw energy and few concerns about storage space. Today's paint box isn't as messy or charming, and the paintings are smaller and more refined, making the contrast quite revealing.
Another relic I discovered is this invitation to a Ray Johnson 'nothing' at the Hecksher Museum in Huntington, NY in 1987. Johnson, who combined a childlike awe of commonplace things like a xerox machine with a complex association of obscure artistic references, married the sacred and the profane in a world where sometimes it was hard to determine which was which. How influential it was for me in my own development to meet a person who could turn his life into a creative performance.

A Book About Death: Belgium

Here is my entry to the Book About Death Show in Belgium.

A Book About Death: Wales

Another round of A Book About Death is on the horizon, this time in Wales. I actually took an old postcard sized gouache that came back from a show in England and turned it into this mixed media collage. Now all I need to do is use that nifty typewriter and add a bit of text.

The ABD show at the MUBE in Brazil posted some pictures on their web site. If you look closely you can find a few of Louise Millmann's postcards, as well as one of mine-- The House of Ray.

Underwood Noiseless c. 1922

Ever since I've started working on collages, I feel the impatient need for a manual typewriter. I've always loved using text in images, and nothing quite compares to the mark making of a typewriter's key stroke. After a quick internet search for a manual typewriter, I realized none would carry as much meaning as if I retrieved my grandfather's 1922 Underwood Noiseless from my parents' basement and refurbished it. My grandfather, Giuseppe Ferretti, was a mechanical man. As a young boy in Italy, he would scour the junk yards for bed springs, reconfigure them, and fix clocks with them. Later, he invented an instrument called the shovelene, a combination bass guitar, violin, and horn instrument. He invented contraptions for the kitchen, guillotine clam openers, spatulas out of stainless steel, napkin holders, so fixing his typewriter with a can of WD 40 seems quite appropriate. As far as typewritten text in collages, Ray Johnson's use of text and image fueled his Correspondence School, with his typewritten letters crossing into conceptual art. Now all I need to do is find a ribbon.

Elvis: An American Icon

Long before the celeb culture of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, there was Elvis. A boy from Mississippi, Elvis Presley, who would have turned 75 last week, remains forever etched in our minds as the quintessential American pop icon. With talent and good looks, Graceland's demi-god became a symbol of mid-century American prosperity, much like Coca-Cola and Campbell's soup cans. Ray Johnson was the first to make him the subject of a pop painting in 1956, well before Andy Warhol's silkscreened images in the 1960's. Johnson's image foretold the tragic hero Elvis would eventally become, entitling his collage, Oedipus Elvis. It amazes me that Johnson would have the insight paint this rising epic icon and the hubris which would eventually destroy him.
Warhol's depictions are far more straightforward-- his traditional photosilkscreens manufacturing images of Elvis in his studio aptly called The Factory. In this diptych, Elvis is taking aim at his viewer, and yet slowly fading out across the canvas.

More recently collage artist Louise Millmann shrank Elvis, reducing him to a postage stamp and a kiss.

On the homefront, our Canned Ham magnet, courtesy of Tom Judson, has had a recent makeover; it's been Elvis-ified.