Bubblegum Pop

My new ethos for 2008 is to open up and share my thoughts more, so let me talk a bit about a piece I just delivered for a Long Island City gallery called Local Project.

LP is upstart and old school -- a gallery run by passionate volunteers who want to promote experimentation and, well, art (as opposed to the complaints I've heard from Chelsea artists that their gallerists are more interested in the financial aspect of owning a gallery).

LP has a yearly fundraiser where artists donate work done on old LP records and the money is used for the gallery's expenses. I decided it's a good cause and that it would be a fun project. As opposed to most galleries in the art market boom, LP is just trying to pay the bills. (Silent bidding starts at $50.)

My first idea was to melt the vinyl. There's something appealing about the texture -- both fluid and solid, like Dali's clocks melting. And continuing with the texture theme, I imagined hard vinyl melted over the soft latex of a hard substitute penis. That's right -- a monster dildo. My sketch looked like this:

Then I looked at the instructions again and realized I should keep the vinyl fairly intact and the protruberances to a minimum. So my dreams of patronizing my local fleshpeddlers in Queens Plaza to buy a king kong dong were thwarted. There's always tomorrow.

I wanted to keep with texture and form and started thinking about unity. It's what I'm always after. To me, it's what the best art is about. I've gone to a lot of experimental music and film shows where the piece begins with order/beauty and descends into disorder/confusion. I always leave wondering why it can't be the other way around. Rarely will a band start out setting their guitars on fire and banging the Peavey amps and end up playing in synchronous harmony. Things fall apart, I guess, but the beauty of the human mind is being able to put them back together again -- even if for a moment.

So I made a painting with a balloon.

Don't ask me how it makes sense, but once I realized I had to use plastic-based acrylic paint, and it would be on a vinyl record, the texture of a rubber balloon made a whole in my mind. Materials were related and tight; they seem to come from the same family. So I thought of the record, how tones can be colors to musicians, and how the circle of a record was echoed in the circles of brass instruments.

I started off sketching a trumpet player. It seemed too cool and smooth jazz for me. My impulse, as always, is to go with the dorky and awkward. So I made with the sousaphone.

I tried to use loud, garish, thick and harmonic colors that reminded me of sousaphone tones. I wanted to use different colors on the different tracks of the records, and wasn't scared about vibrating the line since brass instruments always seem wavy to me.

I wondered what color to make the balloon. As I looked at the colors available to me, I saw the pink and the phrase came to me: Bubblegum Pop. Texture. Music. Circle form. I remembered the sound of a balloon popping, and the piece was done.