Titling Artwork, Pt. 1

It leaks out., 2009

acrylic, tea, toner, and graphite on panel

12" x 24"

Click on image for larger view.

I imagine there are about as many answers to how you title an artwork as there are artists willing to sound off about it. The process for finding a title is often as personal as the process that shaped the artwork, and there is undoubtedly some correlation between how an artist titles and the intangibles of their creative vision.

Most professional artists, when pressed, will state that titling is important. Those same artists, when pressed further, may be unclear as to why they believe it to be important. At that point some small warning bells might go off about how galleries need to sell artwork to the public. Titles offer an avenue for the layman's entry into the "intangibles" of an artwork, which may explain why there are many creators who are aggressively disinterested in titling, resorting to the trusty Untitled #____ for the duration of their career— they don't want the title to be a Cliff's Notes addendum to their vision. They want the public to work for a connection. They want more than just consumption from the audience.

I'm not going to be so crass as to suggest that titling only serves to sell artwork. Judging by how obtuse some titles for artworks happen to be I also believe that titling offers the artist an opportunity to season their creation with another level of meaning. The title can be a red herring or it can provide contextual support for the image/object depicted (or experienced, as with installation or performance art). The title might also be a process that brings about closure for the artist. It becomes a finalizing statement that releases the artwork from the hand that birthed it and proclaims to the artist, more than anyone else, that their time with this work is done.

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More on titling tomorrow. . .

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It leaks out. was derived from a tiny little silver gelatin print of a somber field that my wife gave to me for Christmas. While not evident in the drawing above, the source image had quite a bit of underexposed detail in the field that flanked the small stream. When I began to work on it however, three things caught my attention and led me to disregard a great deal of other detail:

1. The rips in the image that occurred during the transfer process were so pronounced that I felt they had to become an integral part of the image.

2. The soft horizon line of bare winter trees and bramble cut an interesting shape against the sky.

3. The stream's appearance out of the center of the field, with no indication that it began elsewhere, had a sinister quality to it. It was like the field was being bled to do away with an infection. And while that may sound terribly melodramatic, it was the impression that took hold of me when I picked up my assorted graphite pencils.

Milk and Blood

March 6, 2005

Beauty underwrites almost everything in the world. It is not always perceivable in the simple or repetitive things. In dark moments it can be lost entirely from view; but that doesn't mean it has ceased to exist. The subjective nature of beauty lends it the multiplicity required to be present in everything, and perhaps it is that individual quality of each "beholder" that should really be remarked upon.

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You can pour milk into a glass thousands of time and, every single time, a violently beautiful unique landscape is revealed in the splashes of viscous white. The other day, I passed the carcass of a freshly killed coyote. It had been sliced in half by some car which had also moved on down the road. In my headlights it glowed a brilliant flash of red before being swallowed up by the inkiness just beyond my tail lights. Tomorrow we will all awake to another dawn; some will be gray and some the most vivid hues of atmospheric interference. For every person, just that act of waking is a profound invitation to a grand design made grander by the part they will play in it.

Riveted

January 31, 2005

Stopped in traffic one morning I glanced to my left and spied this rig next to me. Now I'd always appreciated the strips of reflective safety stickers that large trucks use on their bumpers and containers, but there was something about the pairing of these red/white horizontals and the chunky bolts that seemed very painterly. There was a compositional structure to the bit of container parked next to me: in the way that the horizontal lines created bands to contain the hardware and in the way that the bolts staggered and alternated their spacing. I assumed that aesthetics was not the driving force behind the structural choices on this truck, but in some ways that made the presence of compositional balance all the more profound, because then the truck became another example of beauty as a by-product of successfully designed utility. In other words, the single minded focus on functionality, and the successful realization of this focus, automatically yielded an object of aesthetic beauty.

This idea is quite dear to the contemporary craft and design world. It dominated many theory classes that I had at the Oregon College of Art & Craft (OCAC) and had a profound impact of a number of my friends at school. In fact, I suspect that the metal hull of the truck next to me initially caught by eye because of its similarity to the thesis work of Ben Ediger, who also had graduated in 2003. Even from the first days of school, Ben had always possessed an uncanny eye for the sublime in the functional. His thesis work was a series of tables created from bent-plywood forms wrapped with riveted sheet metal and given a distressed finish.

Ben Ediger, O/U #1, 2003

plywood, aluminum sheet metal, rivets, milk paint, lacquer

17" x 16" x 48"

Photo: Robert Di Franco

These tables continue to be some of the finest crafted objects I've ever encountered personally. Their purpose is obvious and their use quite intuitive. I hardly need to point out his meticulous attention to detail in both form and finish. They are part of the very reasonable argument against mass production and institutional design. Having recently photographed much of Ben's new work I can also state that these tables are just the beginning to an oeuvre which boldly asserts his commitment to functional aesthetics.

Ben Ediger, O.U.T. #1, 2003

plywood, aluminum sheet metal, rivets, milk paint, lacquer

17" x 16" x 48"

Photo: Robert Di Franco

Otis

January 16, 2005

Otis College of Art and Design occupies the former IBM building in Los Angeles. It's an intriguing building and is in keeping with the architectural inclination of the 1960's toward stark cement cubes. The exterior facade is meant to be reminiscent of a punch card; which I suspect is lost on the majority of current Otis students who were undoubtedly born long after punch cards, or IBM for that matter, had much life left.

Image by Marc Meridith, OTIS Director of Admissions

Courtesy of Wikipedia and licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Naturally, the interior has been remodeled to match our stereotypical conception of the artist loft, but I think the greatest success of the building is not in the exterior view or the elaborate remodel. No, the greatest asset of OTIS is the views it frames of the outside world.

Inside this cold concrete block the dingy Southland sky seems to burst through the tiny rectangular windows and, in doing, is granted a liveliness and power that you cannot perceive from any other vantage point that I've discovered in LA. It is a simple matter of contrast— a living proof of that old photographic axiom that the finest silver gelatin prints always place their blackest black next to their lightest light tone. 

While I can't claim any advanced understanding of architectural principles I can claim many years of working with contrast, and furthermore, I have an appreciation for simple solutions that net profound results. For those who haven't called LA home, who haven't been able to see the city skyline from a hill top vantage only five miles away because of air pollution, it is undoubtedly difficult to understand the magnitude of being awakened to beauty in that chemical miasma. But for someone who, quite literally, grew up in a cloud of chemicals and particulate, I tell you that, until the day I visited OTIS, the only potential for the sublime that high noon smog ever held for me was in its unyielding repulsion.*

I'm of the opinion (and it is a rather plebeian opinion, I admit)** that cement cubes are generally not the best architectural solution for most projects or climates. In Southern California, where the heat is oppressive and banal boxy buildings are the majority, I suppose you can make a case for a cement cube on the grounds that it will stay cool and affably blend in with the neighbors. But if I'm to dissect what I appreciate about OTIS's building it is the opportunities it affords for the eye to escape when the body cannot, and perhaps that, more than balances of compositional light and darks, is what creates the impression that the oppressive grey outside holds more promise than one had ever perceived there before.

*More of a formaldehyde-soaked Damien Hirst type of sublime, as opposed to the sweeping Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich 

**I spent every afternoon following middle school studying in a cement cube, so experience must serve as my credentials here.