measures

Late night, much rye whiskey and reflection on Serra; the artist, the sculptures, the drawings.. the fucking drawings.  This idea of art compressing, altering, redefining, inhabiting space.  I think of James Austin Murray's show; the collision of surface and light and the volume of space.  Associations with Stella, of course, but only now association with Serra.  I quote:

Since black is the densest color material, it absorbs and dissipates light to a maximum and thereby changes the artificial as well as the natural light in a given room.  A black shape can hold its space in relation to a larger volume and alter the mass of that volume readily.  [italics my own]

Serra contends that, "black is a property, not a quality," and why not?  Indeed.  I make work that physically alters the space it inhabits.  This is interesting to me.  Sculptural yes, I fancied myself a sculptor when I began.  Yet the making of things led me to painting; kicking and screaming at times, but led me to it nonetheless.

Something else; "one cannot take down the Master's house with the Master's tools."  So we forge and hack, and co-opt and guerrilla.  One must be irreverent towards materiality; the formal must be the cage from which we free ourselves.  Is this the whiskey talking?  I think not.  For me, the Spanish masters.. Velasquez, Goya, and the Italian Caravaggio.  I wail against the blacks; the eternal space within the space which recedes and yet always asserts.

I am up against the process now.  I cannot execute the size and scale I want to with my current process of working vertical/horizontal/vertical.  I cannot physically lift and lower the pieces which exist in my mind's eye.  They must be contended with; my most challenging work is work I've had to contend with physically.  Like wrestling angels.  There are many warrior paths; mine is the peaceful warrior Way; discipline, repetition, aestheticism.  How can I engage the plane in a vertical condition?  I must wrestle with this.

More Serra:

[black] holds itself to a more compressed field, it is comparable to forging.

Indeed; the reconciliation between my sculptural intents and painterly practice.  I forge the picture; austere and hermetic and unapologetically concerned with the spiritual through no particular god.  I've been contemplating our instinctual human need for new gods.  It is time.  We need gods and myths that speak to our condition.  We need heroic epic poetry to bring our men and women warriors back across the sea.

And now, Boston.  Madness and tragedy.  Senselessness.  Can art [Art] counteract ignorance?  I believe it can, or else I go mad myself.