Tangled Web
A little light cleaning this morning led me to sort through a stack of stuff that’s been growing on the edge of my desk like some sort of living organism, getting taller and stronger week by week. The stack is papers from school, notes that I’ve written to myself, resumes and application forms, etc. As I live here in the compact city of San Francisco, in a small bedroom that borders on being cluttered, I realize more and more often how much useless stuff I own. I feel the urge to get rid of more, whittling my worldly belongings down only what I need. As a member of American Consumer Culture I feel that this is completely impossible. The urge to own is ingrained too deep to carve out. Instead I can only fight it, by occasionally taking a machete to these stacks that grow on my desk.
I’ve been toying with the thought of getting rid of my books. I can’t say that I’ve used many of them since their initial read. Some of them have only had the pleasure of a lightly skimmed introduction and sit shelved, impatiently waiting for me to pick them up and thoroughly digest their pages. There’s something beautiful about a bookcase of books. Also something frightful and cluttered. If they sit unused, then how can they be regarded as valuable? It’s like witnessing the maniacal stockpiling of someone who has survived the Depression or some other great poverty. Boxes, cans and jars, expired by decades, sit on pantry shelves under generations of dust. They will not be eaten, nor will they be thrown away. It’s gluttonous and insane.
Toward the bottom of this stack I find a Contents Magazine from May/June of 2002. I have run across this many times while sorting through previous stacks. There always seems to be a different reason for not throwing it away. In case you’ve never seen Contents, it’s a large publication, 10″ x 12″. The cover of this particular issue features a black and white photo of Hayden Christiensen. The innards of the magazine are lavish with fleshy photos of bodies, both in and out of clothes. Contents seems to draw the most artistic and seductive of fashion photography; their subtitle is “The Style of Culture.” The last time I decided not to throw this magazine away it was because I really liked the fonts and layout, and the general sense of intellectual purpose that it touts through its overall design.
Determined to throw it away this time I quickly thumbed through the magazine with a pencil and a post-it note, jotting down photographers that I wanted to research later. Here’s the list:
Lalli X (Joe Lalli)
Bob Frame
Randall Mesdon
Jody Fausett
Wes Bell
So taking this list to Google, what do I find?
Hardly anything at all.
It really aggravates me when artists - especially more established ones - lack web presence. When I google an artist, as a curious viewer, an inquisitive student, a cash-happy collector, etc., I should be able to find portfolio images, a bio, a resume, and hopefully an image or two of the artist. It really pisses me off when someone advises me to check out a certain artist, whose work I might really relate to or be interested in, and I go online and cannot find anything about him or her.
Could it possibly be me? I admit that on rare occasion I have trouble thinking of the most appropriate key words for internet searches. But typing in a full name should bring up ample results or a webpage at the very least. Even looking up information on artists through websites of galleries that represent them rarely leads to anything beyond a name and single thumbnail. As much as I’d like for everything to be at my fingertips online, it seems as if the world of Fine Art is still far away from adequate Internet accessibility.
This is going to make it more of a challenge to find people with whom I might be interested in recruiting for guided study sessions over the next two years.
Here are a few of the images from Contents that kept me from discarding the magazine over the past five years:
This photo is by Randall Mesdon
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This photograph and the next are both by Jody Fausett.
