Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were divided, were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while To Let To Let To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their unholy interment under the gravel.  A frouzy mourning of soot and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewed ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar - rot of rat and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides - addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, 'Try Barnard's Mixture'. 

Back Issue Mix CD

I just got around to uploading 2 mix cds that I had made and given away last spring. So if you attended Vega Estates' group show last April and picked up a mix from me, this post is not for you. However if you just joined my mailing list and are enticed by the last cd I mailed out, then you should download this seamless double cd. Aquatic Music Box is a featherweight, an eclectic and quirky mix of ambient, electronic, minimal jazz and paired down soul music. Its' counterpart, Wintry Day & Night is a brooding Charles Dickens novel, full of long modern classical compositions.

Aquatic Music Box

Wintry Day & Night

Its now why, but how. 

-Lily

from The Magas

John Fowles: The Magas

pp 237-238

 'I say you are watching a star a star and you are watching a star. It is that gentle star, white star, gentle star . . .'

  He went on talking , but all the curtness, the abruptness of his ordinary manner had disappeared. It was as if the lulling sound of the sea, the feel of the wind, the texture of my coat, and his voice dropped out of conciousness. There was a stage when I was myself looking at the star, still lying on the terrace; I mean aware of lying and watching the star, if not of anything else. 

  Then came a strange illusion; that I was not looking up, but down into space, as one looks down a well. 

  Then there was no clearly situated and environmented self; there was the star, not closer but with something of the isolation a telescope gives; not one of a pattern of stars, but itself, floating in the blue-black breath of space, in a kind of void. I remember very clearly this sense, this completely new strange perceiving of the star as a ball of white light both breeding and needing the void around it; of, in retrospect, a related sense that I was exactly the same, suspended in a dark void. I was watching the star and the star was watching me. We were poised, exactly equal weights, if one can think of awareness a a weight, held level in a balance. This seemed to endure and endure, I don't know how long, two entities equally suspended in a void, equally opposite, devoid of any meaning or feeling. There was no sensation of beauty, morality, of divinity, of physical geometry; simply the sensation of the situation. As an animal might feel. 

  Then a rise of tension. I was expecting something. The waiting was a waiting for. I did not know if it would be audible or visible, which sense. But it was trying to come, and I was trying to discover its coming. There seemed to be no more star. perhaps he had made me close my eyes. The void was all. I remember two words, Conchis must spoken them: glisten, and listen. There was the glistening, listening void; darkness and expectation. Then there came a wind on my face, a perfectly physical sensation. I tried to face it, it was fresh and warm, but suddenly realized, with an exciting shock, not at anything but the physical strangemess of it, that it was blowing on me from all directions at the same time. I raised my hand, I could feel it. The dark wind, like draught from thousands of invisible fans, blowing in on me. And again this seemed to last for a long time. 

....

pp 239-240

  But the fountain changed, the eddy whirled. It seemed at first to be a kind of reversion to the stage of the dark wind breathing in on me from every side, except that there was no wind, the wind had been only a metaphor, an now it was millions, trillions of such consciousnesses of being, countless nuclei of hope suspended in a vast solution of hazard, a pouring out not of photons, but noons, consciousness-of-being particles. An enormous and vertiginous sense of the innumerability of the universe; an innumerability in which transience and unchangingness seemed integral, essential and uncontradictory. I felt like a germ that had landed, like the first penicillin microbe, not only in a culture where it was totally at home, totally nourished; but in a situation in which it was infinitely significant. A condition of acute physical and intellectual pleasure, a floating suspension, a being perfectly adjusted and related; a quintessential arrival. An intercognition. 

Balance Check Mixed CD

The latest installment of my Free Mixed CD project is Balance Check, edition of 70; which were mailed to recipients who replied to announcements I made via email, Twitter and Facebook.  If you want to be added to my mailing list, send me an email cole@colepierce.com.  I plan to send out 2 or 3 mixed CDs a year to my mailing list.  The print version of Balance Check has been distributed, but I uploaded the mp3 version, which you can download here. 

Part I
Zauber - Ellen Allien
Bird In Hand - Lee "Scratch" Perry & The Upsetters
Night and Fog - Claude Vasori
Ribbons - Four Tet
Auntie's Lock/Infinitum - Flying Lotus
Ursulan Uni - Paavoharju
Haiiro - Twerk
Geschichten Von Interesse - Bersarin Quartett

Part II
Okwukwe na Nchekwube - Celestine Ukwu
Clear space - Susumu Yokota & Rothko
Flyin Shoes - Townes Van Zandt
Past Has Not Passed - James Blackshaw

Part III
Untitled - William Eaton
Surf Song - James Yorkston
Womb Duvet - Origamibiro
Cloud My Memory - V. Sjöberg New Jazz Ensemble
Oahu 2.1 (edit) - Freiband & Machinefabriek with
2001: A Space Odyssey (edit) - Arthur C. Clarke



Balance Check

August, 2008

Pierce Press

Fluxus and Slacker Art

I recently learned that Beck's grandfather was Al Hansen.  Hansen was a prominent artist affiliated with the fluxus movement in the 50's and 60's. How's that for a direct genealogical line from the beatnik fluxus artwork, which was often immaterial, based on chance, and performative, to Beck's position as the quintessential slacker of the 90's.  This is starting to make sense.  I see now how slacker art has some roots in the fluxus movement.  Hansen made collages out of cigarette butts, Beck sings about being a loser.  It couldn't be any simpler. 

New Work

A sample of the projects I'm working on.


The Triangle is the Strongest Shape (1,2,3 &4)
18"x18" Acrylic on Canvas

4EVA
12"x12"
Acrylic on Canvas

Piano Hammer
30"x40"
Acrylic and Silk Screen Ink on Canvas



Untitled Installation
work in progress

I like the crowds and the really big shows, people touching people that they really don't know

My iPod is slowly going insane.  This morning on my train commute 30 seconds of a Hold Steady song was interjected into a Nico Muhly song.  This is the 3rd time its happened, however the 1st 2 time were around a year ago and occurred during a song by Our Lady of the Flowers, aka Nicholas Moore.  Nicholas is a friend of mine who started making ambient/drone/noise music when he moved to Colorado.  After some prodding he sent me 5 discs of circuit bent madness.  None of the tracks were named, and at the time I thought he sampled the Hold Steady song, and afterword I couldn't find it.  I thought it was interesting song, 7 or 8 minutes of drone abruptly cutting to Craig Finn shouting "I like the crowds and the really big shows,  People touching people that they really don't know".  The irony kinda made sense.  But this morning it happened again, same Hold Steady sample interjected into a different song. What the hell?  

from The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

But slapped amid these mundane bills, as if it belonged there by right, was a great three-sheet broadside, a thing the size of a horse-blanket, Engine-printed, rumpled in the hasty plastering. Indeed, its very ink seemed still damp.
A mad thing.
Mallory stopped dead before it, stricken by its crude bizarrity. It had been done in three colors - scarlet, black, and an ugly greyish-pink that seemed a muddle of the two.
A scarlet blindfolded woman - a Goddess of Justice?- in a blurry scarlet toga brandished a scarlet sword labeled LUDD over the pinkish-grey heads of two very crudely rendered figures, a man and a woman depicted in busts - a king and a queen? Lord and Lady Byron perhaps? The scarlet goddess trampled the midsection of a large two-headed snake, or scaly dragon, its writhing body labeled MERIT-LORDSHIP. Behind the scarlet women, the skyline of a London was vigorously aflame in scarlet tongues of fire, while the sky all about the various demented figures was full of stylized scrolLs of thick black cloud. Three men, clergymen or savants apparently dangled from a gallows in thE upper-right hand corner, and in the upper-left a confused mass of ill-formed gesticulating figures waved flags and Jacobin pikes, advancing toward some unknown goal under the bearded star of a comet. 

And this was not the half of it. Mallory rubbed at his aching eyes. The vast rectangular sheet seethed with smaller images like a billiard-table littered with random pool-balls. Here a dwarfish wind-god blew out a cloud labeled PESTILENCE. There a cannon-shell, or bomb, exploded in stylized spiky fragments, small black misshapen imps being flung aside by the blast. A coffin heaped with flowers held a noose atop it. A nude woman crouched at the feet of a monster, a well-dressed man with the head of a reptile. A tiny praying man in epaulets stood on a gallows, while the hangman, a little fellow with a hood and his sleeves rolled up, gestured brusquely at the noose . . . More of the smudgy smoke-clouds, flung onto the image like mud, connected the whole business like the dough of a fruit-cake. And there was text, too, near the bottom. A title, in large smudgy Engine-type: "THE SEVEN CURSES OF THE WHORE OF BABYLONDON!!!"

The stones you collected on your trip to the coast never left your pant pockets. They went through the wash, now they are banging and clanging a racket in the dryer. 

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

They have a new species here too: people with antennas coming out of their heads. The antennas look like the ones on cop walkie-talkies: short, blunt, black rubber whips. They rise up from behind the ear. The first time she sees one of these people, she figures it must be some kind of new Walkman, and she wants to ask the guy where he got it, what he's listening to. But he's a strange guy, stranger than all of the others, with a permanent thousand-yard stare and a bad case of the mumbles, and he ends up giving her the creeps so bad that she just shoves an extra-large dose of stew in his face and hurries him on down the line. 

Iowa flooded

My parents live near the flooded areas in SE Iowa.  Recently my mom sent me this email. 

Hwy61, 1, 22, 92, 6, the Burlington , Ft. Madison & Keokuk bridge are all closed.
Oakville doesn't exist anymore. Neither does Gulfport as of last night.
Not sure the status of Davenport. I know the riverfront is flooded but
I don't know about the bridges if they are open or not.
 
They opened Interstate 80 two days ago. It was flooded around Tipton in Cedar county
but 218 is closed around Cedar Rapids. The only way we can get to Muscatine is by
taking 218 to 80 and down 38. It's about 110 miles.
 
Hopefully one of the highways will open by the time you come to Iowa.
 
Columbus Jct can't use or drink their water. Curt and family sandbagged Wed,
Thurs and Friday. Your Dad helped in Oakville on Friday - he said there were
over 2000 people helping. But it didn't work. Dad and I helped a family move
out of their house about three miles south of Kingston on Sat. They were told to
evacuate at 1pm on Sat and had to be out by 10pm. This couple is in their late
70's. Kinda like packing up Grandpa's house - they have lived there over 60 years.
 
I guess there are a dozen or more hog confinements in the Oakville bottoms and
had around 30,000 hogs in them. They could only move out 5000 so they just let
the rest loose - and lost 25.000 hogs. Mary said Doug Lee told her someone got
a picture of some hogs on top of houses and on porches in Oakville. Mary & I went
down to 99 to see what we could which there is only about one mile of the highway
not under water. We talked to some people from PETA and they are putting boats
in today to see if they can rescue any animals. And a guy was shooting a video
of the river and was working on a documentary for PBS. Looked like something you
would do.
 
The river is at a toxic level now because of the chemicals from the farmland & animal
waste. I don't think we will be able to swim in the Mississippi anymore.  
  
 
Have a good day,
love, Mom

Fathers Day Cake Celebration

Fish Tie

I got a fish tie for fathers day,

and my kids baked me a cake.

It was delicious. 

Ingredients:

flour

sugar

salt

coriander

coffee grounds

cheerios

watercolor paint

Photo from Vega Estates Vega Caucus

Pedometer Interview

Amy Rudberg recently interviewed me as part of her ongoing project:

How I’m trying to help my Facebook friends (33): Interview with artist Cole Pierce and his pedometer.


What is a pedometer?
A pedometer is a step counter. It is a device that counts each step a person takes by detecting the motion of their hips.

How does your pedometer work with your cell phone?
After visiting Wikipedia, I learned that my cell phone uses an “embedded 2 axis MEMS inertial sensors to detect the steps a user takes.” My phone displays my steps on the external display. It counts detected steps during the day, and at midnight it stores the counter in a day-by-day history and resets it to zero. My height and weight are used to estimate the length of my stride.

When did you start using a pedometer?
I have been using a pedometer for about 2 or 3 months. My wife activated it for me without telling me. For a few days I wondered what the random numbers on the screen meant. Mostly out of curiosity, I check my step count a few times a day and before I go to sleep. I don't exercise regularly and feel a little guilty about it. If I walk over 5 miles in one day, my conscious is clear. I also feel physically better. And it’s better than sitting on my ass all day long. Walking 5 miles is not very hard; all and all I have my doubts as to whether or not it constitutes worthy physical activity. It seems very little compared to running, biking or swimming regularly. On a different note, I am amused that my phone tediously records something as banal as walking.

What is your daily goal?
My goal is to be better than average, which is currently 8,043 steps (about 4 miles). That is the distance I walk to and from work if I take the train. I question the accuracy of the average, which I guess is low if you factor in the days my battery is dead or if I don't have my phone in my pocket. On several occasions I've walked more than 10 miles, which feels like a real accomplishment.

What do you do to achieve your goal?
Not much. I just walk. I only drive when I need to haul stuff around or if the weather is bad. I don't take extra walks to try to up my step count, but I do try to keep my phone with me when walking. I am more conscious of the fact that my walking is being recorded and archived. I wish there was a web application that displayed this archive and my step count in real time on my blog.


Check out Amy's project here and here is some other stuff Amy is involved in:
http://www.chicagoarts-lifestyle.com
http://www.amyrud.gather.com
http://www.flickr.com/groups/artstylebloggroup
http://www.ehow.com/members/amyrud.html

Old Gold Final Reduction Sale

Outside the Polish Falcoln, Milwaukee WI, May 17th 2008

recontextualized

I had work in two shows over the weekend, both of which were 'heavily curated'. Vega Estates kicked off their summer season of monthly exhibitions with an ambitious group show. Their garage vs basement program will start on June 14th. Last Saturday "The Vega Caucus" promised to recontextualize the included work. The results created a vague narrative, or perhaps developed a fictitious character through installation and curaturial decisions. My ongoing free mixed cd project, which is usually an innocuous stack of cds on the outskirts of my exhibition, was much more public and social. At the curators request my role was more performative. I brought a deck of cards and played 21 with people, and later in the night when I left my post I found the table and cards being used to play war. Via teeny boombox, the mixed CDs provided the backdrop to the rainy opening and Lauren Anderson's dead donkey pinata. Tami Lynn's 20 minute heartbreaking soul ballad played during the violent destruction of the pinata, which turned out to be empty.

Earlier that day, I had a painting in a van sale outside of a bowling alley. Old Gold supplied 23 artists with black canvases and the instructions to make a $100 painting. These paintings were sold out of Old Gold curators Caleb and Kathryn van on the patio of the Polish Falcon for the Milwaukee International Art Fair. They called it the Final Reduction Sale. Mine was the shiny sparkly black one with zillions scrawled while the paint was wet.

mix cds for Vega Caucus

silk screen ink and spray paint on paper envelopes, double cd, edition of 50

untitled collage

drywall tape, acrylic paint on paper 6" x 12"