MeghanIsMe

For the first time since I bought this parody CTA safety poster from the artist, I have it framed and hung up! I really love this piece! It's going to move to live over my computer, though, because Miriam, as much as she appreciates the concept and story behind it, thinks its visually hideous. I actually really love it when we find places our tastes clash and can talk about them because it's so unusual for it to happen and leads to funny conversations.

The story: years ago, I was working in Chicago and taking the CTA on the rare occasions I didn't bike for some reason. Someone named Bleh the Buddha was putting an array of stickers up on the Pink Line, covering up the official CTA signage that he was parodying. (The original version of this one, for example, said things like "Listen for instructions," and "Remain on the train".) This is just one example of half a dozen or so that I saw, all of which I think I have pictures of.

I loved these so much that I found him online and wrote him to ask to buy a print. I did, and when I got it in the mail, I shouldn't have been surprised to see that he sent me an actual sticker, not just a print. He signed it too.

I love this piece because I have so many good feelings connected to Chicago and my time there that this brings to mind, and because it's an anarchic reclamation of public space for public art, and because buying it supported a local artist, and because I really think it's really clever and funny.

I miss Chicago a lot, and having this up feels like a little contrarian piece of it with me.

(I got the frame plus matting from a thrift store and did a pretty lackluster job recutting it to fit. I'll do better with it one of these days. But for now, it contributes fairly to Miriam's distaste.)

Oooh! I found a writeup and interview with him! https://southsideweekly.com/bleh-the-buddha-emerging-artist/

I just saw an image of Macaulay Culkin wearing a shirt that has Marcel Duchamp's "R. Mutt" signature from his piece called "Fountain." Suddenly, I like him a lot more! I think that takes a particular kind of bent sense of humor and history that I appreciate.

The more I think about this, the more I wish I could ask him whether the potential layers of meaning there are coincidental. Do you think Culkin could be comparing himself to a sort of ready-made art piece that was unexpectedly pushed into public view and rejected by elites?
Or is he just being silly and likes classy references to urinals?
The world may never know.

A consistent theme that's informed my choice of road trip destinations is the creative works of the mentally ill, or at least mentally...divergent?... in some way. So when we weeded this book at work, I snapped it up immediately. It should be fascinating reading.

The Discovery of the Art of the Insane.

This pioneering work, the first history of the art of the insane, scrutinizes changes in attitudes toward the art of the mentally ill from a time when it was either ignored or ridiculed, through the era when major figures in the art world discovered the extraordinary power of visual statements by psychotic artists such as Adolf Wlfli and Richard Dadd. John MacGregor draws on his dual training in art history and in psychiatry and psychoanalysis to describe not only this evolution in attitudes but also the significant influence of the art of the mentally ill on the development of modern art as a whole. His detailed narrative, with its strangely beautiful illustrations, introduces us to a fascinating group of people that includes the psychotic artists, both trained and untrained, and the psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, critics, and art historians who encountered their work.

Work by a local artist, Bleh the Buddha, who I mentioned in this space before! To recap, I originally saw something of his on the Pink Line in Chicago, where it was posing as one of the ads and notices lining the car.

When I saw it, I started laughing and took a picture. The person sitting under it looked vaguely upward at where I was pointing my camera, but didn't seem to notice anything odd. Me, I loved it and started looking for more of his stuff online. I managed to find his contact info and had to buy a signed print of this piece for reasons.

I'll get a less pixelated, non-phone picture soonish.
In the meantime, I listen for Punk Buddha.

Seeing the Precisionist art that I have lately is nudging me toward more photography. I guess it's kind of validating, seeing that there were people who looked, most of a century ago, at machinery and infrastructure with the same kind of artistic minds and sensibilities that I have. It gives me a certain sense of externally-originating legitimacy. It makes me want to go on some bike trips through industrial Chicago with my cameras, as I've been doing through some of natural Hamilton.

At the same time, the age of American industry is fading into the age of service and information. For the Precisionists, they were seeing the shape of the present and future. For me, as it's always been, it's seeing the past. The context means so much. Precisionist art and photography is part of a hopeful retro-futurism that makes me happy. It was so easy to feel good about the future, looking at these exciting machines. I see Precisionist art as inherently optimistic.

But what will mine be? I don't want to make pessimistic, retrospective art that longs for a mostly mythical golden age. There's enough of that already, and glamorizing the past at the expense of the present is counter-productive. How can I make art out of the machines and infrastructure that entrance me without taking the easy path of ruin porn? Picture of dead and dying buildings can be beautiful, and I want to keep making them. But I also want to make art of living machinery. Shining, hissing diesel locomotives; not dull, silent steam engines. Humming transformers with their conical ceramic offsets and high-voltage cables, not gashes in walls cut by scrappers to steal electrical conduit. Life, as well as death, and the transformation between those states that these inanimate objects progress through. I've focused a lot on deaths of the inanimate. That's important, but there's more than that. I'd like to create art that fosters optimism instead of nostalgia and loss.

That is, if anybody finds my art moving anyway. Maybe they don't and I'm just flattering myself to think I'm producing anything beyond a few colorful pixels that people can look at for a second and scroll by. I don't know. I'm feeling a lot of self-doubt and negativity lately, and that's kept me from doing much art. Maybe that's part of why I'm feeling a need to change focus.

What active infrastructure is near me in Chicago? What can I travel to by bike, hang out with, get to know, talk to, learn about, and make images of? If depression lifts long enough to actually do some shooting, I intend to find out.

If I end up getting arrested, please tell the police that I'm mostly harmless.

I chatted with a volunteer's father tonight about an art movement I'd never heard of; Precisionism. We were talking about my interest in photographing infrastructure and he told me about a Precisionist artist who he talks about in his humanities class at a community college. I looked up the movement just now and I'm in love with it, both in concept and in practice. This is (one of) my kind(s) of art!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precisionism

The shelter was a good time tonight. I accidentally took out a supervisor only dog and am embarrassed, but I know where to check for dog status next time, and it was ok. Cookie the Jack Russell is out of her cone and doing better. I got nuzzles and ear-licks from Eve, a gentle pittie. There are a couple of dogs who look like big chocolate labs who are in until their owner proves they have their shots, or gets them done. Hopefully they'll be going home soon, but they're sweet and fun. Brooklyn was frenetic as usual as we walked around the park, but manageable. It was nice to have some dog time.