Albondigas soup

Yesterday I hired Sean to do some scanning that I had been putting off for years. At .15 cents a copy, it's a great deal for me and a great job for him. He was super happy he made $15. I started playing around with the images and made a couple of pages for my comic book (the final versions will have more characters and word balloons). These took a life of their own. I'll probably use them for a sequence in which the protagonist, in a hypnotic reverie, reminisces about velvety abondigas soup. What struck me about the images, however, are a number of parallels between what I'm doing at school and what I've been thinking about film.

1. These pages are essentially the final project for Art 200. They are multi-modal compositions that incorporate images from Illustrator and Photoshop. I never made the connection before between multi-modal photo montages and my multi-modal approach to film, but there you are. BTW, the photo of the woman is an authentic old school waxy color xerox from the early eighties.

2. Ever since my dissertation I have been wondering about the "in-between" nature of the computer. I wrote about how abstract expressionist painting disclosed anxiety and process. Painting, as an analog medium doesn't allow you to go back and correct things so "mistakes" became fixed into the substance of the work. The computer, on the other hand, is a simulated world in which nothing is fixed. Layers of imagery exist without commitment leading to a tepid, floating quality. Yet there is an approach that exists outside or between authenticity and simulation and it is this: we bring into our use of a medium our understandings, our perceptions and knowledge. When I'm arranging these pages, I frequently put things at slight angles. These aren't a simulation of hand paste-up. This approach is based on my past experience of doing layout by hand. I'm trying to achieve a slightly off-balance, thrown-together look that echoes my experience and observation doings things in the analog world.

3. One way I make these things is to create obstructions for myself. I just start throwing together pretty much any image into a composition. I then try to work myself out of the mess I created. Sometimes I can't do it. At other times I am. This process of trying to rescue and recover work leads to a specific kind of performative quality.

4. I keep writing about how I dislike artiness. These things do look arty, but for me the resemblance is superficial. I think it has to do with why one does things. I think I dislike artiness when it looks like the use of visual signs to give things the authority of art.