viapaper

For twenty five years prior to my 2002 retrospective exhibit at AS22O, I publicly exhibited chalk drawings on a special paint surface called BLACKBOARD SLATING applied directly to the gallery walls.

Trained as a minimal/conceptual artist from the age of 13.. IT SEEMED TERRIBLY IMPORTANT TO ME, when I reached Graduate school in 1975, TO CREATE MUSEUM SCALED PIECES THAT WERE VERY SITE SPECIFIC, MADE IN THE PRESENCE OF ITS AUDIENCE AND ADDRESSED SPECIFICALLY TO THOSE VIEWERS. But obsinately frustrating to their desire to own or control the works. THEY WERE TEMPORARY AND HOPEFULLY IMMUNE TO THE COMMERCE IN OBJECT D'ART THAT HAD SWALLOWED THE WORLD.

Working and exhibiting in public with none of the "sanctuary" that Barnett Newman attributed to an artists studio, I was amazed how angry people became when confronted with art so UNPROTECTED AND TEMPORARY, and in the case of people moved by the egotistical notion of owning art by buying it- that there was no option of this kind available.

Then suddenly the paint stopped being manufactured because it was an oil based alkyd resin concoction

which had some environmentally objectionable aspects.

SO... I began using great long pieces of tarpaper to draw my site specific pieces.

The nature of particular materials and the aspects of them that reflect

my own nature is one of the best things about choosing a medium & working with it for extended

periods of time. Painting on slated walls I found a deep relation between the ability to erase completely and states of mind which had been classically refered to as tabula rasa (blank slate). Chalk dust arranged on a slate was about as close as I could imagine a medium being a medium without crossing the line where it was only a concept.

When I started using tarpaper to make site specific drawings I began to see that many of my photographs and the emerging body of work I was creating on-line, were introducing brand new formal elements. Attaching paper to paper, layering tearing rolling and FOLDING! (were all mind bending for me, no pun intended) as well as being a new way to combine my black & white & color photographs, scraps of found paper and a great number of printed texts that I had created to comment, criticize or otherwise complicate the colloquium at AS22O-with the black and white chalk drawing that had always been my primary lexicon in the realm of public exhibitiion.