“For years people have been concerned with what goes on inside the frame. Well maybe there is something going on outside the frame that could be considered an artistic idea.” —Robert Barry (1968)

At what point do we begin to visualize an image in the mind? Do we need to be provided a direct image to do so? Words have the ability to help our mind to create images, and yet some words don’t produce an image. In a parallel fashion we encounter images which drive us to words, and some images which elude description altogether.

What would the space between image and words be? Performance, space, time, creative process, formation, translation. When the world was formed, it did so as God spoke. Words became a material, physical reality. What a beautiful parallel this is for our creative effort. When we speak a word, it can be a creative act. When the word becomes an image, and when that image is perceived, it moves us between the abstraction of language and the concreteness of reality (or sometimes, a lack thereof).

Etymologically, the word ‘image’ is rooted in a reflection, in imagination, in imitation. ‘Word’ comes from speaking, saying. And maybe this process is in some ways symmetrical, but resulting in different forms. Speaking brings about images; images bring about speech, even if not spoken aloud. Mel Bochner captures this idea:

“Imagination is a word that has been generally banned from the vocabulary of recent art. Associations with any notion of special power reserved for artists or of a “poetical world” of half-dreams seem particularly unattractive. There is, however, within the unspecified usage of the word a function that infuses the process of making and seeing art. The root word “image” need not be used only to mean representation (in the sense of one thing referring to something other than itself). To re-present can be defined as the shift in referential frames of the viewer from the space of events to the space of statements or vice versa. Imagining (as opposed to imaging) is not a pictorial preoccupation. Imagination is a projection, the exteriorizing of ideas about the nature of things seen. It reproduces that which is initially without product. A good deal of what we are “seeing” we are, in this sense, actually imagining. There is an overlap in the mind of these two dissimilar activities. We cannot see what we cannot imagine.”

What I love about the works of many 1960s conceptual artists, (Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Sol Lewitt, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, etc) is the way in which they seemingly play in this space between language and image. Conceptual artists often call into question the very materialization of a work of art—whether or not it should be physically rendered, or if it actually exists at all. If a statement is typeset on a piece of paper, is this idea the work of art, or is the production of that statement the work of art? Is its printing on the typeset page the art object? Where does its true origin live? For conceptual artists in the 60s, and perhaps many now, these questions are pervasive.

In 1969, Robert Barry created the piece “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969”

Barry’s work often revolves around the immaterial, such as his Inert Gas Series, in one of which he released a liter of Argon into the atmosphere on a Santa Monica beach in 1969. Not all works of language evoke a mental image or are required to have an associated art object as a record of the work’s materiality. 

The MoMA description for the work reads, “While documentary photographs were taken of the action of the releases, the only physically tangible evidence of the work would remain the poster, published by the New York art dealer Seth Siegelaub, who stated, “He has done something and it’s definitely changing the world, however infinitesimally. He has put something into the world but you just can’t see it or measure it. Something real but imperceptible” (Gallery label from There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33”, October 12, 2013–June 22, 2014).

Lawrence Weiner, well known for his work with linguistic statements, says a “work need not be built.” Language can function as a material itself, and is not dependent on construction. In As Far as the Eye Can See,” Dieter Schwartz contributes the essay “The Metaphor Problem, Again and Again: Books and Other Things by Lawrence Weiner.” They of his Weiner’s work, “A word corresponds to an object in Weiner's work, a group of words to a number of objects, since the linguistic elements have the same value as the object, the same value as a picture of it.” 

His “Statement of Intent,” first published in 1968 outlines this approach:

1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Similarly, in his “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Sol Lewitt says in sentence no. 10, “Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.” Lewitt’s works build on this notion by using his own intuition to create language, which is then executed by other artists and draftsman, rarely Lewitt himself, which not only adjusts a definition of making, but of maker by challenging the notion of an artist as an author or craftsperson.

In a historical context, Weiner and other conceptual artists challenged the notions of the Abstract Expressionist works, which focused on the canvas as its own self-referential world and space. Through happenings and performance works, audiences began to participate in artworks, opening up a new space for creation and receivership. In discussing his paintings, Weiner said, “The picture-frame convention was a very real thing. The painting stopped at that edge. When you are dealing with language, there is no edge that the picture drops over or drops off. You are dealing with something completely infinite." 

Similarly, Robert Barry, in a discussion with philosopher René Denizot, said “Hopefully it allows it to be dealt with not just as a visual item. It should be dealt with in a, I'd like to say, more wholistic way. Closer to the way we live, the way we encounter the world. I'm being critical of a formalist approach to things; that the value of art has to do with its formal structure - color relationships, spatial relationships and things like that. I hope my work is approached from more than just that position…”

Conceptual artists, by playing at the boundaries, the borders, between language and image might supposedly lead to a dematerialization of the art object—to immaterial concepts only. For many artists like LeWitt, this is almost true, yet artworks have not fully propelled towards immateriality:

“Such a trend appears to be provoking a profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may result in the object's becoming wholly obsolete.” 
—Lucy Lippard

Lucy Lippard’s classic book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972... brings together a host of conceptual artists exploring the boundaries of these ideas. Later she addresses the complexities of the terminology around dematerialization: "Since I first wrote on the subject in 1967, it has often been pointed out to me that dematerialization is an inaccurate term, that a piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as “material,” as a ton of lead. Granted. But for lack of a better term I have continued to refer to a process of dematerialization, or a deemphasis on material aspects (uniqueness, permanence, decorative attractiveness)." 

The idea of dematerialization can only ever be partially true. In many ways the concepts and ideas still must exist in the world we inhabit, whether taking a physical form or not. To deny something’s temporal existence altogether denies the reality of being in the world, whether this means words becoming sound, language becoming a print, or an idea existing in a physical mind.

Walking this line opens the bounds of experience around art and living—to bring it into a more holistic way of being in and experiencing the world. To not just absorb a visual work, but to see art and making as a way of existing in the world, observing it, and participating in it.

In Robert Kinmont’s 8 Natural Handstands, we see him doing handstands on cliffs, rock faces, on stones, in a stream, in a field, in a desert, and in the woods. Trees and mountains line the backgrounds. Though the black and white photographs are monochromatic, we sense the blue of the sky, the reflection of light on water, the shadows cast by his denim jacket. The series marks Kinmont’s intimate ties to northern Californian landscapes, the immediacy of his experiences there, perhaps a longing to be more in connection with each space (but this might be pushing it).

But further than this and in the context of conceptual art, this work to me embodies the interdependency of being in the world and of making something with its materials, even by using the self. On one hand the “artwork” itself leans towards dematerialization—only the photographs document the actual activity that occurred—on the other, it is a direct reference to materialization and limitation, the body in the world. On the borderline between language and image, material and concept, its symbolism in this context is about the ways in which we exist as human beings with limitations in every sense, tied to the world and yet able to perceive and communicate certain concepts and ideas which are ultimately unseen, cannot be seen, or cannot always be captured by language—sometimes in a platonic sense. To me this is one of the most beautiful parts of this work, and perhaps of many other conceptual artists’ works. In a sense they often record, document, capture, and submit for investigation something greater than their act, whether it takes a physical form or not. To reference a statement by Seth Siegelaub used earlier, they capture “Something real but imperceptible.”

Collage is not a form of translation, or vice versa, but they're related. Translation and collage are both movements from one surface to another. In translation, one takes a poem, subtracts all its words-and refills it with other words, words of a different language. There is, you'll notice, a hole in the middle of that statement. If the words are removed, there is no longer a poem there. [...] If you think about that too long or too deeply, you tend to give it up. Nevertheless, this is what happens.

—Keith Waldrop

Keeping with the tradition of listing out all of my favorite books and albums from this year (and not necessarily released/published in 2022).

Books
Agnes Martin: Night Sea, by Suzanne Hudson
There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, by Joanne Kyger
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell
Upstream: Selected Essays, by Mary Oliver
Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, by Wendell Berry
Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives, by Susan Howe
Dubliners, by James Joyce
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, by Michael Schur

Albums (or, things I listened to a lot this year)
Leland Whitty, Anyhow
Phil Cook, All These Years
Alvvays, Blue Rev
Balmoreah, The Wind (Live in Marfa)
Dana Gavanski, When It Comes
Aldous Harding, Warm Chris
Weyes Blood, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
Martin Courtney, Magic Sign
John Andrews & The Yawns, Cookbook
Alex Bleeker, Heaven on the Faultline
Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee
Jeff Parker, Forfolks
Fleet Foxes, Shore
Cut Worms, Nobody Loves Here Anymore
Louis Prince, Thirteen
Suzanne Kraft, About You
You Become the Mountain, Jeffrey Silverstein
Bonny Doon, Bonny Doon
Loyalty, The Weather Station
Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold / Tall All the Things That You Broke

In my current season of life, having a family, working, taking care of our home, and any other number of weekly tasks fills most of my time. So I’ve naturally been thinking more about what I’m doing with the time that's left over. And not necessarily how “productive” I make it, but in what I allow space for. Admittedly this can be exhausting. To constantly be “curating” my intake, or to continually “budget” my personal time can come with its own set of burdens. To have landed some free time, and then to spend it trying to choose what I’ll do can be a daunting task.

Looking back at what I’ve read over this past summer, I am catching a theme of what it means to be actively present and attentive in my daily life.

In listening to music, musicians typically differentiate between passively listening and “actively” listening. To listen to music as most of us know it now is to start a playlist while we cook in the kitchen, focus on work, or drive our morning commute. To actively listen is to sit with the music more directly—to try to understand how it was made, to distinguish between what we do and do not like, or to understand the structures of the lyrics or melodies we hear—and then to draw on these as creative inspiration.

In actively listening to music, we focus our attention in a creative way by engaging on a more critical level with something we think we know. To focus on something in particular means not focusing on anything else, to actively tune out other things. This might be one of my favorite parts of being a designer. In Designing Design, Kenya Hara opens the book with this thought:

“To understand something is not to be able to define it or describe it. Instead, taking something that we think we already know and making it unknown thrills us afresh with its reality and deepens our understanding of it. […] For instance, suppose there’s a glass here. You might know about a glass. But what if you need to design one? The moment a glass is proposed as an object to be designed, you start thinking about what kind of glass you want to design, and you lose a little bit of your understanding of “glass.” Arrayed in order before you are dozens of glass vessels of gradually varying depths, from “glass” to “dish.” What if you are asked to clarify the exact boundary point between one and the other? Faced with the objects, you’re at a loss. And again you become a little less sure of your knowledge of a glass. However, this doesn’t mean that your knowledge has been overturned. Indeed, it’s just the opposite. You’ve become more keenly conscious of glasses than before, when you understood them by simply unconsciously calling them all by the term “glass.” Now you actually understand glasses more realistically.”

Anytime I begin a design project, it’s implicit that I’ll have to focus my attention on the small details which I thought I knew, but hadn’t really looked **at before. Through the act of design, we are forced to make distinctions between what we like and what we don’t, and what will work best for a particular person or group of people, in a specific place, and in a specific time.

If we’re taking queues from design, the main takeaway here is that attention is by design—and design is really just creating a set of conditions within which to actively focus on something. Paying attention requires us to create conditions within which to pay attention. I think the idea here is intent.

Over the course of her life, Mary Oliver embodied this notion of paying attention. Earlier this summer I read her collection of essays in Upstream.

“Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect […] Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

How do we begin to describe our own process of becoming, of our movement through time and place? As if on the same wavelength, Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, writes:

“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

For Oliver, to be alive is to be attentive—to our own hearts, to the places we inhabit, to eternity. Similarly for Odell, our attention is ours alone, and often we find that it is more and more at risk of being taken from us unknowingly, with serious consequence:

“In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily […] “It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”

Odell’s book is important on so many levels, one reason being that she rightly identifies that fully owning and claiming our attention as an opportunity for us to re-engage on a deeper level with things that are important to us.

“We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

For Odell, owning our attention can be seen as an act of resistance against a social and cultural system which makes piecemeal of our time, and continually prods us to be productive, innovative, fresh, and new. Especially in the world of design, this terminology has become second nature. But what I love is that this act of resistance towards “moving forward” can lead us towards stewardship of things which already are:

“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

Odell continually touches on the concept of bioregionalism, arguing that paying attention to our surroundings, to the place we presently are, will drive us towards a greater understanding of the natural world:

“…beyond its practical emphasis on local networks, there’s something about bioregionalism that seems to satisfy the age-old human longing to be a member of a community, to be both in and of a place. (OPEN SPACE)

As she discussed this concept throughout her book, I felt that it connected deeply with many of Wendell Berry’s writings about food, local community, land, and place.

“My own experience has shown me that it is possible to live in and attentively study the same small place decade after decade, and find that it ceaselessly evades and exceeds comprehension. There is nothing that it can be reduced to, because "it" is always, and not predictably, changing. It is never the same two days running, and the better one pays attention the more aware one becomes of these differences. Living and working in the place day by day, one is continuously revising one's knowledge of it, continuously being surprised by it and in error about it. And even if the place stayed the same, one would be getting older and growing in memory and experience, and would need for that reason alone to work from revision to revision. One knows one's place, that is to say, only within limits, and the limits are in one's mind, not in the place. This is a description of life in time in the world. A place, apart from our now always possible destruction of it, is inexhaustible. It cannot be altogether known, seen, understood, or appreciated.”

In many ways, this echoes Oliver’s attentiveness to her time spent walking on Provincetown, continuously observing flora and fauna, land and sea.

The first book I read this summer was Life is a Miracle, in which Berry critiques E.O. Wilson’s Consilience. Throughout the book, Berry defies the concepts of materialism and reductionism, arguing instead for us to pay attention to the mysteries and complexities of life in the places we inhabit. Here are a few of my favorite passages:

“I think that the poet and scholar Kathleen Raine was correct in reminding us that life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to "figure it out" or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is, as Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters.”

“I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.

And maybe this is the most wonderful part of paying attention: that it awakens us to being alive in the world.

At the end of last year I posted a list of books and music I had listened to over the course of the year. Even though we’ve still got a month left in 2021, I had time last week to go through our collection and note down all of the records we bought this year.

We’ve been consistently buying about $30 worth of records each month for the past year, and I love that we’re getting to support artists we like and also building a physical collection. I feel like I’ve noted this many times on here before, but it’s been a lot of fun listening to music with our kids and having tangible pieces of art and music in our home. I’ve also been tracking everything on Discogs—it has been an amazing resource for liner notes, release dates, and nerding out on the details. It's like McMaster-Carr for records. I still marvel at the technology of the record as an art medium—its ability to be such a (mostly) affordable and (mostly) accessible form. The experience of sitting down to listen to a record alone or with friends and family is such a blessing in our hurried culture.

This year with a budget of about $30 per month (except in June when we bought a bunch of stuff on Record Store Day…), we ended up buying about 35 albums. Some of those were cheaper flea market finds, like Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, Glen Campbell’s By the Time I get to Phoenix, or Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years. I picked up a few great jazz records like Jimmy Smith’s Greatest Hits, Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, Jeff Parker’s Suite for Max Brown, Miles Davis’s Miles in the Sky, and Spencer Zahn’s Sunday Painter. A couple other favorites we picked up were a reissue of Beach Boys Pet Sounds and the new 2xLP set Feel Flows, Felbm’s Tape 1/Tape 2, Fleet Foxes Shore, Real Estate’s The Main Thing, and Leon Bridges Coming Home. There are quite a few more we purchased, sometimes for a few bucks and sometimes for $30. Probably my favorite record that was released this year and which we own is Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra, and released on David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop.

I read a book earlier this year called Vinyl Age: A Guide to Record Collecting Now by Max Brzezinski, and he describes multiple ways of thinking about record collecting. For example, you might be interested in collecting whole discographies of an artist, finding a specific sub-genre you collect within, or trying to hone in a curated collection of your favorite albums. I think that’s where our collection tends to fall. Genre-wise, we have a pretty wide range, from some classic Laurel Canyon records by Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Mamas & Papas, The Byrds, or CSN&Y, to indie folk/rock stuff like Real Estate, Julia Holter, Kacey Johansing, Dirty Projectors, Vetiver, or Devendra Banhart. I’ve been hoping to add in more jazz records over the next couple of years, so I’ll report back on that.

Lastly, there were a bunch of records I listened to and loved this year, but haven’t purchased yet. These weren’t all necessarily released in 2021, but were albums I heard for the first time and found myself replaying over and over (in no particular order):

In a Silent Way, 1969, Miles Davis
Miles in the Sky, 1968, Miles Davis
Amethyst: New Sounds from Moon Glyph Records, 2021
Scissortail EP, 2021, James McAlister
Tape 1/Tape 2, 2018, Felbm
Promises, 2021, Pharoah Sanders, Floating Points, and London Symphony Orchestra
Kite Symphony, 2020, Roberto Carlos Lange
Far In, 2021, Helado Negro
Paul Simon, 1972, Paul Simon
Conflict, 2020, John Carroll Kirby
Space 1.8, 2021, Nala Sinephro
Memory Streams, 2019, Portico Quartet
The Elements, 1973, Joe Henderson & Alice Coltrane
When the World Was One, Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra