Had a show in West Philly. It was on my birthday, by chance. I made a zine of cornbread. It was called Kemeys Goethe’s Indiscriminately Esoteric Cornbread Zine.
I’d made cornbread the day before the show, and drew on top with siracha. The design was pleasing after having been baked, as it darkened and fissured and cracked with the ‘bread’ crust. Otherwise leading up to the art show, I was caffeinating and tryin to write ‘bitchy’ essays, making polemic, clearing myself a wide path perhaps. I was having a difficult time. Mark Twain said there is not a man that truly cares about finding the truth; it tapers at some point, resolution dovetails with fatigue. That’s why adults are full of cockaninny. My lover sent me an interview with the author of ‘Tex’, in which he’s asked if writing is a form of self-punishment, and he said yes. He said that all young writing is a from of narcissism, and what’s more, that acknowledging it is the capstone narcissism.
What a sad thing, to make things. Of all the uphill battles, a self-defeating one.
To copy-paste from something I’d written earlier today; and that will wind up on my website likely soon enough as an artist statement:
Kemeys is interested in how things change depending on how you approach them. A fried egg tastes differently when camping than when ridden with gluttonous heartburn. There’s this one artist, who is accused of killing his lover. He says something like; “when someone learns to read, they forget how to make art- because they think that everything has to mean something- but it doesn’t. Art doesn’t mean anything. It just is.”
That’s a right modern thing to say. Has some truth to it though, doesn’t it?
Is it any less true because he may have killed his lover? I don’t mean to be an apologist.
Embarrassing Though it may be, that bounce in my diction has to do with my listening to Ulysses on audiobook. I don’t understand a bit of it. I’m trying, by reading cliffs notes and a Wikipedia entry. I’m listening at 2x speed, so that doesn’t help, but my idea is to get through with it, so I can go in for a second round and hopefully get something useful. It’s bespeckled with anti-Semitic anecdotes from a character, and lots of interesting linkages zooming from ancient times to post-industrial. I’m thrilled to have embarked on this touchstone from 1918. My inclination is that I’ll go for a third listen too, that I’ll somewhat need it.
I’m painting (repainting) the school (PAFA), over the summer for nine buck an hour. It’s miserable work on my joints turns out. I relayed my physical pains to a friend and he asked how old I was. I said twenty-eight, and he said, ‘yeah, you got it.’. I guess that was validating, in a way. I think he actually said, ‘you’re there’. I feel in some way I am there, aside from making close to minimum wage. I am greatful, no doubt, don’t get me wrong. People I love and respect, when I tell them about my job, they say ‘good for you’, and ‘keep it. It’s hard out there’. I trust them. I’m happy for the income.
Painting of PAFA model Emma sold out of the student show for $500, happy about that.
Went to Kayla Gray to ask about employee benefits and she said basically I had none, but to let her know if I was ready to apply for another position, to let her know. Trying to put together her sting of a sentence, I think I was being offered a job, or to know that I had something in the bag or something. People have been treating me real nice at PAFA as of mid-last semester. There must have been a big meeting. All of a sudden, when I’d talk to people they’d say ‘you’re going to do great things’, and that sort of stuff; or ‘you’re already doing great things’. The coming of age story is prefaced by a non-acceptance, and followed by a welcoming home; the ringer, the gauntlet, the paces. It’s no wonder men aren’t interested in truth when they can have comfort; life is god damn (great) hard.
I’ve got a ‘felt’ painting idea. It originated with ‘felt’ graffiti, then went though it’s own stages, then the word fell off the thing. It’s like a poster, but without words now. The design is wicked without text. I’m in the process of converting it into a felt painting. I thought I was going to collaborate. I had a friend design the word ‘feely’ in graffiti, then scrapped that, then designed it myself, ‘feelie’, to be sewn by another friend, changed it to ‘feelies’, then after consultation from another friend, dropped the word and just kept the background. I mentioned in a former post the idea of being a loud mouth about processes, and it’s by this modality that I credit the evolution of this piece. I’m happy to be bouncing the ideas around. In a way I feel much more comfortable with the process of creating now that I’ve got some experiences and crackpot rules to abide by.
I’ve applied for three mural gigs, no replies. So much for experience, as I’m about ten years deep into Graffiti/muralism. I wonder who (in an open call format) could be more qualified than me?
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Went out to get more felt. I’d budgeted $300 for the project. I spent $150 on commissioning the word design from a friend. He needed the money anyway. That the design was scrapped is sad. I was going to pay the tailor $150 for sewing the piece, but alas, last night while prepping materials for her, I learned that hot gluing the cut pieces into place serves the ends I want from the piece. The piece idea is one I’ve carried around for maybe five years; graffiti made from felt. I’d heard some art criticism that someone’s work was ‘done, but not felt’. This I thought was a funny companion anecdote to the concept. (The antithesis to this would be an unfinished work that pained me greatly- ‘felt, but not done’). So this being my last summer of college before I go ‘into studio’, complete with critics and thesis panels, I think it’s a fine time to flush out a bunch of old, ‘bad’, ideas. It’s like my home stretch to make art.
So, so much for outsourcing. The labor of the felt piece falls back squarely on my shoulders. Luckily I have a process to manifest this one.
I have enrolled in a political cartooning class with Steve Brodener through SVA’s CE department. It’s not my first time doing CE with SVA (my first being three classes in 2013). Those 2013 classes had such a lasting effect on me (especially Skip Sorvino’s graphic design class), that I thought to give it another go. I’m still all upset about someone who’d mentioned to me that a long term goal is to do political art, and I felt that I knew exactly what she was talking about- that’s the pinnacle! Steve Brodener seems to feel this way too, and seems to live having inscribed the principles of ‘the blend’- ie placing two things next to one another to create an effect, to say something- akin to Puck publication, into is heart and intellect and career. It’s an online class, described as half lecture, and half drawing.
The art show went along alright. I showed up fatigued from a week’s labor painting at school. I’d in a mad dash cooked up five cornbread dishes with designs alighting the tops, photographed each, digitally collages them into a zine format, and ran back from my apartment to the school, where I edited and printed about twenty of the zines, and picked up display supplies. At the show, I met Grace, who I’d met earlier when she was touring the school with her mother with interest to transfer from Cooper Union. She’d made the switch and had made a day trip out of coming to see the student painting show, and when I knew about that I appealed her to come to this punk warehouse art show, and she did. I showed up two hours late to an art show I was to be featured in, hugged the hosts, found a corner, and sat down with my bags, wherefrom I pulled out pre-wrapped sections of cut cornbread and zines, and a digital projector, which I plugged in and shined onto a nearby dark wall and image about 14 inches square of a picture of cornbread. I handed out zines and cornbread til I had run out, and that was my piece.
I get all heated at work sometimes. I feel that time is being wasted, and energy. Sometimes the boss man is coy about it, so it’s like we’re on the same team, but most of the time he is belligerent and wasteful. I feel more qualified that bossman in regards to team management. I wonder how this will mature- it would seem that I will do alright somehow, that’s more and more the picture- that things will be alright, yet my low wage and already hurting body encourage impatient thoughts in me. I’ll always be below some older negligent person, and above young ones with two left feet. The other week a coworker asked me for advice on how to handle painting with the door. Looking down, I saw that my coworker was asking about underneath the ajar door itself. On hinges, I swung the door to demonstrate that all parts of the floor were accessible to paint by nature of the moving part. These moments are forgivable, but it has stuck with me and made fodder for inner chuckles.
I’m slotted to participate in a art market coming in two days. How strange it is that this far in (and I experienced it with the art show too), I have not much ‘product’. I don’t think art’s like that. Product can be derived from craft. Art market to me then seems paradoxical, or oxymoronic, I don’t know which. That explains my cornbread piece, too. I felt good about the cornbread piece. Someone said it was their dinner. It was mine that night too.
Roommate’s attending bartending school. I meant to write a collection of essays for the group warehouse art show, for this time of transition; one essay on ‘major themes’, which I did manage to get out became more of a stream of consciousness thing and digressed into guilt for adolescent lasciviousness. I couldn’t publish that! The next essay was to start with the line; ‘If you make bad art, there’s nothing like a pop-up show’, and was intended to undercut, then frame the night itself into a new context, that now that the polemics had been expressed, the night could go on. Now I think that’s how comedy works, the ‘everyone’s thinking it’, sort of thing, and or ‘at least I’m not that sad rat’. Another essay was to be entitled ‘A letter to my future Roommates’, and start out ‘Dear roommates, I’m using you for cheap rent.’
Suffice to say, and as already mentioned earlier, these gestures were to give myself space, and to guilt dump, and I felt wholly unmotivated to produce the terrible writings. It’s for the best I think in this case. The cornbread idea was much better. . .
Now I am less in transition than in a channel. The summertime is portioned out this time in eight hour block of painting labor. Mornings of never-enough-sleep, and evenings despair and of never-enough-studio-time. I still have money; I am blessed in that way, but I can feel a kind of grinding away that nags is it worth it, and motivates me to (feeling ever less artificial of a threat) get far away from this sort of shit job.
Thank you for your time in reading this, and I hope you are well.
