Cotton and Being

The culmination of (and perhaps even the justification for) a mind towards the Arts is the commission for a T-shirt design.

I once knew a man who owned 2 beach homes, earned 6 professional degrees, and had 8 arms… but he was no one, because he had never been asked to design a T-shirt.

The client in want of a T-shirt (A local, short-lived band, an esoteric activist group, a charity event no one has ever heard of) is the sole source of meaning and longevity to the talents of the Purveyor of Design (The graphic artist, the photographer, the second cousin who will work for $20 and a sense of value).

Jackson Pollock was never asked to design a T-shirt, and he was shit. Probably because of this.

I, of course, have never felt the cold hand of existential artistic nothingness, as I have always been asked to design T-shirts -if my memory is correct- since the dawn of anthropological being.

Prouns and Proun-ies

“Prouns” with apologies to El Lissitzky, “Proun-ies” with apologies to verbicide and God.

Presented here (the time has come to explain myself): Efforts to bring, or at least express, architectural motivations and the seeds of vernacular through two-dimensional painterly space. Acts of Modernism, and by certain modalities of extension, acts of Constructivism and Suprematism, from which the work concerned here derives its inspiration from, are acts of top-down grid management. The Prouns and Proun-ies are markedly different in this sense, as they suggest without defining; not agents of narrowing solutions, but figures of broadening potential, in whatever mediums they may be concerned with, at face value or otherwise.

 
 

Future Archeologies

Build to Fall...

Our contribution to the undigested mass of the earth, our not-yet ruins pedagogical to some future archeology student (as suggested in the cartoon above, most likely named Clavius) may be the ubiquitous curtain wall. As the stone column was once simultaneously ubiquitous and endlessly varied, the aluminum and glass storefronts stand as a fixture of our age and as a fixture yet to be rediscovered. Perhaps they will be classified by universities- not ‘Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian’, but ‘Discount Fashion, Casual Dining, Highway Truckstop’.

There will be exhibits at the Smithsonian titled “When Extruded Aluminum Ruled the Earth” and children will gaze in wonderment as the poor modulus of elasticity of the non-ferrous beasts is demonstrated by an elderly volunteer, complete with a themed café and gift shop.

Whole colleges with specified areas of study will pop up and doctorate students will devote years of their lives writing esoteric discourses with titles like “A Didactic Inquiry into the Tertiary Symbolism in Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits’ Vestibule Systems” and “Serenity Through Thin Brick: A Buddhists’ Analysis of Non- Glazing Infill Solutions.”

Perhaps, in the vein of the early paleontologists or like the Brontosaurus, the curtain walls will be incorrectly reconstructed and impossible stereotomic monsters will be rebuilt in workshops: Homages to a kind of past, as misrepresentational as they are beautiful.

The symbolic capacity of the inane will be explosive with time.

On Occasion

Occasionally, in the banality of stairwells, between lost keys, we will clear our throat and we will gain glimpses: not as a transgression of moment, but as an affirmation of movement.

Past-y Blast-y 2: Electric Boogaloo (Or, Old Architectural Renderings Transformed Into Pepper Mill Catalog Entries for the Holidays.)

Non threatening sniplets from the past, offered up for free viewership, playfully annotated, and best enjoyed in the comfort of your domicile with unwashed dishes in your kitchen sink.

You see, the problem is, is that I think that I’m funny.