Category: Art

I photographed Victor yesterday, and his magnificent white beard. The film is drying, and I’m terribly excited to get some contact sheets made. I’m going to make a grid that looks like the ocean, with huge blurry white waves. While photographing him, the finished piece appeared before my eyes, and I’m frantic to get it made before leaving for Paris next week, although it seems unlikely. The pictures of Tim also seem like they’re going to be fun to work with. The arms of Dallas are presenting a larger challenge, and I wish I had taken more pictures of him with greater depth. Here’s a post of my first attempt, and although it doesn’t seem cohesive or finished, there are areas that intrigue me, so I’ll continue trying to figure it out. Let me know what you think…

Unzipped, a glossy prettyboy magazine is publishing some of my Jack & Mack pictures, along with an interview of me–well, actually answers to a few questions tossed at me via e-mail. To give you a sense of the quality of this fine journal, articles this month include, “You spooge, you lose,” and “It’s too damn big–the, uh, problem we never thought we’d admit was a problem.” Jack & Mack will be presented alongside the oiled and tanned buffboys of Unzipped, escaping temporarily from their Brush Creek ghetto, spreading fur, middle-age paunches, and joy to the uninitiated. Look for it in newsstands everywhere in AUGUST.

The images of Tim and Dallas came out fine. Here are a few images of Tim that I’ll possibly be working with. (Keep in mind that these scans are of my contact sheets, so the tones and contrast are uncorrected):

and a few of Dallas:

I’m very excited to be working with real images again, after a five or so month break. Interestingly, my relations with these two gents has been conducted almost entirely in virtual space, involving an interaction with their innermost thoughts and only briefly their exposed bodies.

Stay tuned to see what happens.

Meanwhile, back in the studio… Today I processed the film of Tim and Mr. Dallas. I should be printing contact sheets later in the week, but can’t guess how long it’ll be before I have anything in progress to show. Tim has a magnificent swirl of hair in the center of the small of his back, and Dallas’ forearms are swathed in delicate hairy whisps. There’s so much possibility… After these two (or so) pieces, I may move away from the rigidity of the grid format that I’ve been working with, and introduce different-sized images, or even color, within each piece. I’ve been thinking a lot about the boundaries of identity, and specifically Leo Bersani’s “shattering of the self.” I’d like to explore a balance between the recognizable and the fantastic, or even the absence of the body.

Big Chris and I met Su-Chen for dim sum at Ton Kiang this morning, and then visited da Vinci’s Lady with the Ermine at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It’s part of an exhibition called “The Splendor of Poland,” which includes many paintings from the Polish court which fail to illuminate anything close to splendor, except for an exceptional early work by Ingres which indeed splendidly depicts a man’s torso, connected to a gorgeous face no less, with a full head of wavy hair and wispy mutton chops. The flesh is like butter, translucent and soft, melting, but also with a solid muscularity. The other paintings just disappeared from memory, though, upon encountering the da Vinci. Were the Palace of the Legion of Honor my museum, I would put the one painting on display by itself and allow one person at a time to spend an hour with it. The tension is in its simultaneous perfection and awkwardness.

Over the last week, the majority of visitors to my website have been from Italy, and the top keywords used to find me were “large+hairy+hole.”