To know a place, like a friend or lover, is for it to become familiar; to know it better is for it to become strange again.
Art
Shuffles the Deck Over and Over
The Henry in Seattle is showing Mungo Thomson’s Composition for 52 Keys in the first gallery as you walk in. It’s beautiful to see the piano alone in the room, and somewhat spooky to see the keys fall by themselves. Thomson’s Composition for 52 Keys will not run through all the possible combinations of musical notes […]
Making Up Stories About Work
In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami talks about trying to stop making lots of little decisions on a run. He wants to “just set the machine going” and then try to just watch himself run. This works because it shuts down the narrative-making impulse that’s always trying to decide where […]
Doing Less – Speaking @ Find Your Moose
I was honored to present the keynote session at FYM 2015, a work life conference in Chicago last week. My friend Molly Connolly introduced me with an image of a painting I’d finished this year–coincidentally, also of a moose: I’d started that piece in 2003. The ochre is iodine. The rest is oil, pencil, separated house […]
Chris Burden, Endurance Artist, Dies at 69
I still remember as a very young artist being shocked to find out that many of the pieces that were a big influence on me–Sampson, All the Submarines, 5 Day Locker Piece–were all by the same guy. I must not have been a very close reader. (And I had the same experience years later with […]