Five Things, by James Huckenpahler
James Huckenpahler, frequent contributor to Now:Here:This was creator of a project called Five Things (archived here), which chronicled the influences on a handful of artists. He reprises the concept here, filling us in on his “top 5″ influences for this week…
In no particular order:
1. Jason Falchook’s recent works have the unsettling quality of a dream of someplace that looks familiar but feels strange–I’ll call it ‘Cinder-block Gothic.’ About five years ago I saw a suite of his pictures that were very deliberately staged dramas, and like Cindy Sherman’s film stills they conveyed more about the staging than the narratives they framed. Intentionally or not, the pictures suggested that the staging, in fact, was the significant narrative. Jason has since jettisoned the baggage of staging without losing the narrative suggestiveness. Oh, and by the way, they’re really beautiful.
2. While DC is provincial in many respects, we do have an abundance of free access to great art and art museums. Ian Jehle has put together a series of panel discussions for DCAC, each with a group of artists [plus one non-artist] working in a particular vein reflecting on influential works. I missed the first panel, but if the second one was an indication of things to come, the third and forth should be great.
During the discussion the other night, Jack Rasmussen [Director of the recently-opened Katzen Center at American University] made a great assertion about art education–I can’t do it justice, but will paraphrase: An art education teaches how to make qualitative judgements, a skill which is harder to acquire and more broadly useful than quantitative judgements.
3. I tend to lock myself into very narrow tracks when I’m working, so conversations with Kenseth Armstead always have a kind of liberating effect for me: he can take a single key idea and play it out over all media at the same time. This summer he will be an artists-in-residence at Harvestworks, developing a video game that is a companion piece to a movie he is working on that is itself the byproduct of an in-progress suite of drawings.
The central character in this project is James Armistead, a double agent during the revolutionary war. The early drawings feature portraits of Armistead transposed in different combinations with Lafayette and Cornwallis–you can see Ken visually working out the complex relationships between the three on paper, in a way that can’t be done in a script. [Oddly, in the drawing above, Armistead looks suspiciously like Marion Barry. Accident?] The subject matter immediately suggests an Ian Fleming narrative dressed up in colonial clothes, but in this case the familiar male archetype is complicated by race, place, and time.
In a proof-of-concept trailer, Ken complicates matters further by adding the vocabulary of digital video edits, effects and typography. Waitaminnit–didn’t Spike Lee direct ‘The Patriot’? Well regardless, we all know that every Hollywood blockbuster needs it’s own video game. My contribution to the conversation? Ken, the skins for all of the models in the game should be hand-drawn and scanned.
OK, who wrote the algorithms for the non-player-charcters? I think the redcoats are all alcoholics.
4. One of the better DC art blogs, Thinking About Art, is also home to an interesting project, Artists Interview Artists. [Artists Unite contributor Sky Pape has participated.] Often, the questions reveal more about the artists’ concerns than their answers. That said, my favorite answers are in this interview.
5. Adrian Parsons has been doing some interesting procedural work for the last few years–moving paintings that ‘grow’ themselves. What’s remarkable is that they aren’t created using a programming language, but rather by writing action scripts in programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop that generate individual frames. He then compiles the frames in Final Cut Pro. [Here's a sample]. I have used some of the same tools, but Adrian has generated really different results, and taken it into time-based work [I'm still just making pictures!]
February 6th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
[...] James Huckenpahler created a long-lived recurring project called Five Things that I had the good luck to be part of. We’ve tried to pay tribute to that project here, with contributions from former participants James and Jason Gubbiotti. You can see an archive of Five Things here (it starts with the last entry, so pull down its archive menu). Our redux is here for Huckenpahler and here for Gubbiotti. [...]