Generally, for the last two years I have been struggling with an age old problem for the performance artist and that is is how to make decent photography from video? Additionally, since my interests are more conceptually sculptural than concerned with painting these days- How to turn video into an object? And principally how to render the the physical and emotional space between the viewer and video art? Is additionally, I found a lot of inspiration in Rowland Barthes, specifically rereading Writing Degree Zero, 1953. See below

Since about all of these works are large graphic display versions of some corresponding video or digital animation that have been shown on, or created as part of, the Douglas Kelley Show, I was very much interested in his cultural and historical pop theory of the development of the novel and its more modern forms.

I had been aware for awhile that through the combined affect of my activities I was involved with a lifelong personae art project with perhaps more literary than visual art antecedents. Examples of personae writers and artists might include such figures as Jack Keroac, Allen Ginsburg, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Tracy Emin.

Through my Unintentional role as social art historian as publisher of the Douglas Kelley Show List and as producer, director, and star of the Douglas Kelley Show The TV show, and through my on going body of painting and graphics work- I am involving basically a non-linear novella of of this particular moment in New York.

While not aware of it at first, since September 11th, Ive been quite aware that this spate of image making rekindled by my interest Rowland Barthes and his views on photography. With this body of work I have tried to completely move away from the concept of a viewer looking through the window at traditional physical picture space, in favor of trying to locate events in theoretical imaginary space some where between the viewer and the picture plane.

September 11 focused me on these somewhat formal considerations while drawing on the energy of the emotional shock. Because of this art events list, the DKS List, the first group of images made from video shot on 911 got some immediate international attention and were widely circulated and placed in different magazines. The one above appeared on the cover of an Italian conceptual art magazine Crudelia, and appeared as such in the magazine's ad this past summer in the Basel Art catalogue.. Next

Read more >