proper's notes

Michael Kimmelman's June 10th review of the 2009 Venice Biennial seemed to calling for Swoon's Swimming Cities of Serinissima, who were en route. In particular, Kimmelman's summary of the work at the heart of the show -- by the Gutai group ("Japanese avant-gardists from the 1950s/1960s"), Lygia Pape (a Brazilian artist "who came to prominence around the same time"), and Gordon Matta-Clark ("the short-lived American iconoclast of the 1970s") -- could have been written about Swoon and her merry band of travelers:

Devising quasi-utopian projects of hippie-ish experimentalism by often fugitive means, they aimed to engage more than an art audience and to spread joy. They saw themselves as liberationists, optimists, fabulists and troublemakers without exactly being ideologues, who shared an almost alchemical knack for transforming scrappy materials and tests of sensual awareness into fine modernist forms.

Kimmelman notes that these artists bring "cool pleasure" to the main exhibition, and knocks the overall show, noting "the Biennale is meant to be a survey of new art, and while conscientious young artists now dutifully seem to raise all the right questions about urbanism, polyglot society and political activism, their answers look domesticated and already familiar. They look like other art-school-trained art, you might say."

Swoon's crew, by contrast, built a flotilla of boats from discarded trash, running on engines converted for biodiesel, to sail from Slovenia (where much of the wood in Venice originally grew) to Venice, with performances along the route (a play, puppets, music). This fits more with the "quasi-utopian, hippie-ish experimentalism ... aimed to engage more than an audience and to spread joy" than with "art-school-trained art" (check Tod Seelie's blog of the trip if you don't believe me).

more on the project on their blog, flickr, & facebook pages, in NY Magazine, & all over the web.

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just stopped by sf camerawork's ersatz mail art show and my work made it safely.

(previously discussed here)

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i got travis millard's most excellent new zine tear jerker in the above envelope.

i love the zines of travis & mel. and their envelopes.

in sharing my new zines (1, 2) with them, i printed my first envelope.


i heart my printer.

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my submission for sf camerawork's ersatz show, which is seeking "2-D lens-based" mail art work (show runs June 4 to August 22, 2009).

i employed a process i developed and named "extreme digital masking" for this (and other related) work. i think of it as an extreme digital version of the analog masking process whereby part of the negative or positive is covered (masked) during the printing process. spending a lot of time with digital darkroom tools (e.g., photoshop), i push masking to an extreme, masking most of the background image but preserving enough to show the structure, in a way only possible in the digital environment.


(more examples in my san francisco study)

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welcome to the billyverse (my new website, it is a work in progress but in reasonable shape)

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"50/50 on & not on / no & not no
(ode to Tauba Auerbach)," 2009

my donation to the lab's 25th anniversary auction


11.5" x 23" facemounted to plexi.

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the new page in blu's sketchbook (&on his blog) is poignant, and sad. i saw it just as i was thinking his gaza strip, a mobius strip of tanks and bulldozers, met that description, he refined it. the print came out nicely.

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in part, i am using phallic local organic produce to poke fun, in a humorous, sex-positive, manner, at what may be considered perverted in our society. one element of perv (local, organic) only "works" if the viewer conflates a vegetable with human anatomy. blurring the line between human and plant will, i hope, help to break down our (human) disconnect with the natural world. i was planning on combining this with local organic for my mfa submission but received strong discouragement from some local arts folk who i trust.

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