lisa walcott

My notes are directly related to ways that I identify myself in the ideas in Gober’s work, so this is quite slanted reporting (but it’s a blog, so that’s expected, right?).

Gober creates uncanniness through moods of aloneness, voyeurism and lack of sense place and time.

Primal Fantasies: the fantasy is not the object of desire, but it’s setting
Gober creates the setting putting the viewer into a space like a Magritte painting or a Kafka novel.

Delay and suspension are fundamental to desire.

Connecting childhood memories with new experiences or information changes the meaning of the memory.

I saw this piece installed at Chicago’s MCA over the summer. The piece hits on quite a few things that I really like in art work. The essence of the material informs the content of the piece. Air is used in a powerful and interesting way. There is also a nice balance of simplicity, delicacy and a hint of violence. There are elements of this train of thought in my pieces Fly on a String & Burnt (see below).

February 2009

I came across a really great video on activesocialplastic.com (which was quoting posts on Boing Boing and Wooster Collective). Artist Joshua Allen Harris made a series of pieces where animals are made from plastic bags and then ties to subway grates. Quite simply, every time a subway passes, the animals come to life. Check it out!

A new inspiration/favorite artist. Ceal Floyer’s witty & poignant work hits on something I constantly am striving for. Her work is dryly poetic in the way of a John Updike short story, but lingers like a drip on the edge of a spout. (Yeah, I just made that up! Ha!) Anyway, her work is interesting. The most interesting thing to me is the reveal of the work. First you have to figure out what it is, then you “get it”, then there is a moment of transcendence where you realized it’s more profound than you first thought. I like where these pieces sit in my mind. I like the way my mind is encouraged to wander and connect.

Ceal Floyer at Lisson Gallery
An article from Frieze

I like the way Annette Messager relates to memory of childhood. The desires and fears of children are so untainted that they seem like they would give us clues into the nature of things–of us. I saw a Messager on my trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and really liked it in person more than I did in images.

“I like to tell stories… children’s stories are monstrous,’ Annette Messager has said, and much of her work of the last four decades is based on toys and childhood.”

Recently as few pieces have emerged that relate to memories from my childhood. I never imagined that I would be that artist and makes autobiographical work, because I have traditionally thought that this level of self-reference excludes the viewer from experiencing anything but voyeurism. I am rethinking that stance as I ponder whether or not the particulars in life are actually contain more universals.

Here are the pieces about me and my past:

“Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

(quoted from Wikipedia)