My latest set of drawings are for a show of Gallery Directors in the Dallas area at Mountainview College. Instead of sending a proper representation of my recent art, I made a series drawing inspired from all my time hanging art shows, specifically student art shows. (They are pastel and graphite on paper, in a frame: not photos.)A level of pleasant boredom overtakes me as I preform the quasi-technical labor of installing different sized art pieces on a 58″ or 60″ center. There is a nice rhythm of measuring, marking, centering, leveling and placing hardware that I often find more interesting than the work I am hanging.

The Series title, Le Bore, is French for the element Boron; a nice mix of Moron and Bore. Phonetically it sounds similar to Labor. So, as I do this mundane art labor I often become bored and come up with moronic descriptions for the art work I am about to install. It is kind of silly and kind of ‘meta’ to consider the installation of art as art, especially when the boredom of installation creates the time to consider such tasks as possibly profound. For instance, while working my mind will wander into a conversation like this:

“The centering of anything is a profoundly spiritual act, refied by the technical tools of leveling and measuring, which are of course arbitrary systems  with which we align our ‘self.’ In this way, the act of installation becomes an existential paradox of continually relocating one’s supposed ‘self’ within a myriad of curated possibilities.”

The inclusion of meta-data (the post-it note), an arbitrary description of a piece the viewer will never see, offers the idea of an art object (a bad Rothko knock-off) within a more dubious art object (my boring drawing). Yes, it is snarky. Most behind the scenes revelations are, which is horrible and kind of funny.

14 Apr This entry was published on April 14, 2013 at 11:32 pm. It’s filed under Art and tagged art. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.