Still Wet is an abstract painting inside the Julius Caesar gallery space.
The Rules
1. We meet at 4 or 5 pm at Julius Caesar on Sunday May 31st to paint the floor and ceiling white, and to mask the bricks. (this is not required of everyone, but try to make it if you can.)
2. The official work begins on Monday morning 6 AM June 1, 2009.
3. Each person gets 12 hours from the time they get the call ("okay, go, its still wet! I'm a minus, you'll be a plus")
3.5. If you cannot answer the phone when you get the call, you have one hour to text-back or call-back ("okay, i'm on it!") before the person who called you is obliged to call the next person on the list and send them off and running. In this instance, the person you were skipped for will call you when they are done and you will have another chance.
4. The minuses will use white, flat, latex house paint (three gallons supplied.)
5. The pluses will use acrylic paint (in the color revealed to you by secret ballot last friday night) purchased from an art-supply store.
6. There will be a neutral bucket - a five-gallon bucket bright orange bucket from Home Depot, in the space. Please dump your extra paint (not the white, just your color, otherwise we may run out of white) in that bucket at the end of your shift. This bucket is for anyone (pluses or minuses) to use throughout the week. Keep it tightly closed. Stir it or not. Keep it "swirly!" if you like...
7. Any tools are acceptable (brushes, rollers, sticks, spray, etc)
8. All surfaces, floors, walls, ceiling and door are paintable, paint-worthy, accepting of paint. EXCEPT the curtain area leading to Hans' studio. Please be careful of his space.
9. Your “plus” color was written by one of the six of us and drawn out of a hat. Use this color and neutral bucket when in the space.
Here is the order:
1 Dana (gray)
2 Molly (black as night)
3 Kaylee (blue)
4 You Ni (azure, oxblood, purple)
5 Judith (orangeish-gold)
6 Aline (burgundy, brick, oxblood, magenta)
(after Aline, the order starts again. only this time in reverse. ie Dana began as a plus and is now a minus, hence I will be a plus, Kaylee a minus, Youni a plus, Judith a minus and Aline a plus. If we manage to have time to go a third time, then reverse it again - Dana a plus, Molly a minus etc etc.)
I.
Walking into the space for the first time was like walking into a measure of chaos…in a real big way. I’m thinking…what the hell have I gotten myself in too?! Crossing the threshold of the door way, and then walking to middle of the space, I did a 360, scanning around and around trying to take it all in. Looking at the walls and the scale of the painterly marks made by the two women before me. I felt energized, and also a bit apprehensive to how I was to find my place in all this, what to add and where, and trying to find some underlying order in an apparently random series of painting events. Thinking about chaos, it’s hard to avoid that void when it comes to painting. It’s a phenomena that goes with the territory, always a challenge, but somehow manageable. But looking at this room was meeting chaos with a capital C ! In life I try to avoid chaos as much as possible. I drive the speed limit, I make my bed every day, and I try to make moderation my mantra….I try. Anyway these simple acts give me comfort, safety and a certain amount of peace. So walking into this room I walked smack right into the biggest amount of disorderly chaotic beauty big time…and little did I know that as each woman in the project added her voice/vision to the painting conversation the look of the room became more about a chaos that embodied a strange kind of beauty that was not to be repelled or feared, but one to embrace.
II.
Good or bad …in this kind of situation you go into automatic pilot. You start doing what you know, there is no right or wrong, well maybe,…but you just put that aside and go, you pick up this tool or that bucket, or grab a rag or what ever, it’s like Survivor the TV program in there, trying to respond in the moment…it’s life affirming! Or in my case sloshing around in puddles ...water, get the mop! The mop makes damn nice marks, use the mop, work with it, see what happens… you’re painting, and you’re in a partnership with 5 other women, this feels life affirming, remember this. Take this moment back to your own studio, use it, and remember.
III.
Day 5 of the project. The last time I was in the room I got caught up in the whole thing. But in my second painting session I caught up in a wholly different way. I entered a zone where in those moments of flow you lose time, like some alien abduction, you get so deeply lost in what you’re doing you are transported into the pure making of the thing. When I walked in the space this second time around there was so much going on in the room it made me dizzy. On one hand it was wonderful to look at, and on the other it felt like way too much. The very first time I painted in the room I was a Plus, I was to add a color, and did so carefully, but this time my painting was to be the Minus factor, to edit, to white out, and edit I did! So much so that I when I left the space 7 hours later I had feelings of guilt. Did I go too far? Did I take too much away? Did I really mess things up; will my fellow painting partners be pissed at what I’ve done? I went to bed worried and tried to come to terms that this was the nature of the project, and that my undoing of things could turn out to be a good thing for the next painter, who would take the reins and make something new happen out of my disruptions…this is what painting is all about! Working on your own you are in charge of your own painting mess, and the faith and trust you muster up hopefully can fix the dilemmas inherent in the work. The beauty of this project for me was to continue to rely on that faith in ones self, but more important to let go, be mindful of, and to keep the faith and trust of the other women, that somehow when all is said and done, we would all find a (collective) beauty, a kind of beauty-chaos, a miraculous hybrid of painting events, that would hold an ultimate surprise.
IV.
One of the first things I notice looking at the photo of all of us is the difficulty in locating myself as a whole subject. I discover myself as a series of disconnected, recontextualized, contingent parts: fragments.
V.
Each frames the other in a competition and combustion of visibility.
VI.
Seeing the subject: identifying a work as the work of an individual. Separating and framing, comprehending onesself as a self, and therefore the other as other and individual, atomized, is the subject and often the object of painting.
VII.
This is not collaboration as a utopian idea about working together or de-hierarchalizing (although...) It is Painting proper: an activity that takes place alone: one person, in a room, confronting space and time, color and whiteness, absence and presence, covering and uncovering, making decisions, recognizing onesself in the act of making decisions.
But its not just about being alone - there is an element of dialogue to it in that each has an opportunity to respond, in our own time, our own way. To say, in effect, "no, its not like that, its like this."
VIII.
There is still something anthemic, epic, volatile and electrifying about six women getting together and having a dialogue (think the seventies) Maybe it’s about the WAY we listen to each other. Is it or isn’t it radical? It’s post-feminism now, even though we are not post male judgment of women as inferior, as unimportant, as essentially NOT MATTERING to history. To function phenomenologically as chaos, as chthonic forces, dark undertow, unconscious, earth energy, anarchic bitches’ brew of aggression, is undermining the rationalization of all. Not just feminism as such, it is the power of unreason to unsettle the decisions we make, the control we exert, the trajectory we think we are on. In the end I let go of myself, my desire, my knowledge of painting and followed stroke for stroke the path forged before me. I sank into others’ decisions, waged combat, embellished and defamed in turn.
IX.
“I don’t think that monumentality has anything to do with being big. It is about not displaying your “rules.” If an artist doesn’t show how the work is made or if the ironic relationships between all these independent parts are not clear the viewer is just controlled by the work. This is what makes a work monumental. A very small piece could control you. My work does not control you, you control it – by the way you walk through it. In addition, the unmonumental work does not try to impose one point of view. Instead, the point of view – or response – is determined by the viewer who walks through the work and sees things in new or different ways. We just see this moment. At another moment, we choose a completely different frame, which leads us to understand the complexity of the encountered structure.”
X.
Mission2: Fight against geometry, Reach the highest point, Kill the white.
XI.
Put a layer on top of every mark to see it underneath purple. Pour a bucket of water on everywhere. Make a purple river on the floor. No Landscapy! If don't know, just cover it up. Do it fast. Pour a bunch of purple into the grey bucket. Can never avoid it.
XII.
Start it over!
XIII.
I don’t know what to say except that I found the whole thing pretty terrifying. Every time I’d get in there alone I’d think “God, I really don’t know how to fix this.” As if fixing were some how the thing to do as apposed to simply painting. Nope, it was never about creating something new, it was about keeping something from falling apart- maintaining the situation.
XIV.
Painting on one’s own happens in much the same way though. Through crisis we make decisions, adding and editing until we feel the crisis has been averted. In this case the crisis happened to be contending against five other creators/maintainers each with their own method for “keeping it together.”
XV.
In the end the best part was seeing how those visions collided. Each of us experienced our own internal emergency within the space and dealt with it by altering someone else’s.
XVI.
In the beginning was… Who was that? The Slits or Xray Spexs . What are we saying in this show what are we doing? Maybe we are creating an imagined present in the near future? Maybe this is just a group show with a funny set of parameters? Or maybe we are just leaping into the void with our clothes still on? What exactly is it? I def don't want to figure it out merely speculate an’ ponder the possibilities.....
Right, wright, write......
XVII.
During the course of this project, we were bit by dog and cat, went to the emergency room, had orthoscopic surgery, got a tetanus shot but no stitches because they don’t stitch up potentially-infected animal bites, were hit by a car, fell off a ladder, fell off a bicycle, took our medicine, took the medicines prescribed to others, puked, peeled, planned our wedding, scraped, swore, dripped, flung, shat, shot, slipped, smoked, took up smoking again, clocked in, sat next to the speaker, read, cried, yelled in the car with the windows closed, hurried up, taped off, fell asleep with all the lights on, cleaned the litter box, fucked nice, moved in, fucked without really paying attention to the details (not nice), dressed up, left our bra on the kitchen floor, put on blue eye make-up, took off running, changed the batteries, cleaned the litter box, cooked dinner, danced around, put on costumes, had a drink, had another, were apprehensive, scowled, gesticulated wildly to add emphasis, trailed off, shrugged, almost cried, realized we couldn’t do this other thing because it hurt and we’re sick of that shit; we were disgusted by our body, appetite, habit, gender, sex, career, hometown, lack of empathic criticism, gravity, the failures and exigencies of collaboration, by the fact that painting is hard; were equally pleased by same.
It was good to have things happen, for once, to us.
Aline Cautis, Youni Chae, Dana DeGiulio, Judith Geichman, Kaylee Rae Wyant and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung June 2009