Bill Durgin – [↑] Nude-8 from Figure Studies series (2010) [-] V with Plywood and Mosaic from Studio Fantasy series (2015) [↓] Untitled from Nudes and Still Lives series (201X)
Truth told: I don’t get nearly as much hate mail as other similar Tumblr blogs–but I do get it.
Lately there’s a theme which you can essentially summarize as follows: you think you are being ‘deep’ but really you’re just showing yourself to be an idiot.
This sentiment is usually appended with evidence of my idiocy–which 9 out of 10 times demonstrates the anon to be incapable of fifth grade reading comprehension. (Seriously, though: if I had a nickel for every time some fuckwit represented what I actually wrote as stating the opposite of what I actually wrote, I’d be dead.)
I swear I am bringing this round to Durgin, please indulge me a little bit longer…
I’ve spent the last 7 weeks or so pulling together materials and doing so writing towards the end of :::deep breath::: trying to see if I can maybe get my ass into a graduate art program.
It has been a very slow, largely unpleasant process. I’ve found that–while I would never say that putting comments together for these posts is “easy”, per se… it’s not something that usually stresses me out. (Sometimes it does but that tends to be the exception that proves the rule, honestly.)
On the other hand, it is ridiculously time consuming… but I digress.
Anyway, what working on these applications has shown me is that while I am sure there are more than just the two forms of writing I am now going indicate, for me, writing seems to come in two flavors: exploratory and clarifying.
Exploratory means something like following a path for nothing more than curiosity w/r/t where it ends up. Clarifying means something more analogous with showing your work while solving a math problem.
The first one is more or less what this blog entails. Grad school application writing prompts are my in line with the latter.
All five of the applications I am in the process of completing are fixated on the ability to clearly and concisely explain my creative process in writing. You’d think I’d be really goddamn good at that by now. Alas that’s not the case.
The difficulty I’m having–and it has taken a positively stupid amount of time to get clear on this–is, simply: as much as I am interested in process (hell, this coming from the girl who wants to travel all over the face of the earth and do video interviews with creators I fancy about their respective processes…), I am EXTREMELY resistant to the framing of process first-and-foremost in terms of questions-of-how and secondly (or, perhaps not at all) in terms of questions-of-why.
The best way to render this abstraction concrete is to think of questions-of-how like a recipe–say for chocolate cake. You have your list of ingredients with respective proportions for each, a summary of implements required to prepare it and instructions on how everything is combined.
And here I should stop and point out that this is an appealing notion from at least the perspective of inclusion–it makes art seem like something anyone can do. The problem with that is at the same time it makes art making seem easy: and that is a mistake of enormous magnitude.
Art making is damn difficult. And whereas you may go to make a cake and find out you don’t have eggs–there is rarely an equivalent in art making for getting in your car and scooting to the store to buy eggs.
That’s why questions-of-why matter–because it’s the answer to the question of why that’s going to sustain you when you see no possible route forward in your work.
The way I think of it is: the recipe is not the cake it makes and a recipe does v. little to fill an empty belly.
How does all this relate to Durgin’s work? Perhaps, I’ve been gazing at my own navel for too long with this applications but I feel like there is a way in which he has systematically fetishized his process in his product.
I mean any time you’re dealing with studio work, you are dealing with de-contextualizing environment in an effort to focus with less distraction on the subject. In a way this work is a deconstruction of studio practice–wherein the relationship of the subject to the studio is emphasized over and over. And the subject emphasized is frequently abstracted to the point of being a place holder or a suggestion of form.
Durgin is exceedingly adept in his use of color–it’s very different, however, than most of the folks I usually name check when on the topic. It’s not like Amanda Jasnowski’s impeccable sense of the interactions between colors or Laurence Philomene’s color as signifier (this is not entirely the way I want to say it but ‘form’ is too heavy handed and ‘tone’ is too innocuous) or Prue Stent, who is one of the few people I know of whose work seems to aspire to interrogate color as Platonic forms.
Instead, Durgin seems impressively attuned to the way the directionality and intensity of illumination affect color fidelity. (He straight up references this is several of his pieces by including those ubiquitous color charts in the composition.)
There’s all sorts of commentary on mass digital consumption, boundaries and glitches in the work. And this makes me think it’s perfectly suited to addressing questions-of-how with regard to process.
And not to slight the work, but I’m not able to grasp from reading the work, any sort of clue as to the questions-of-why. The work is exquisite and technically refined to a level that is extraordinarily rare. I just don’t understand the drive to get to this level merely to exercise mastery. There is something profoundly lonely about this work–all of it. That’s interesting and I think I for one would be interested in seeing what transpired when the work was allowed to interact with that emotional resonance in a less coded, more straightforward fashion.
But to circle back to where we began–the asshats who write in criticizing me for think I am ‘deep’ are correct on at least one count: more often than not I am being entirely superficial in my comments on here. I’d like to go deeper more often. And there’s not always the available time or energy to allow for that. Unfortunately, it’s also sometimes down to the fact that no matter how much I want to, my brain won’t cooperate.
Acetylene Eyes 