CORPORATION ON THE WATER
LxWxH (xBC) May-June 2012 "BlastCenter"
Essay by Ian Gazarek


Last week, I swear, I woke up every morning wondering where I was. I still don’t know what’s
wrong with me. My stomach has also been acting up. But this is, you know, the dark cloud that
forms the center of an illuminated silver lining. This is a joke my wife and I have. In the
morning, as the world shifts in place around me into something I remember and understand, I
always feel the realization enter me that I live on the thirty-fifth floor of a forty-story condo
building. I stare out at the Gulf of Mexico stretching out endlessly beneath my window. I lean
my head against the glass and feel the alternate waves of remembrance and unfamiliarity pass
through my brain as I inhale and exhale, trying to match the patterns of the approaching ocean.
My doctor says nothing is wrong with me, but what does he know?

I’m thirty-five. I’ve worked since I was twenty-three as an executive at the ExxonMobil oil
company. I started at an office in Tacoma Washington where I organized shipments through the
port in Seattle and I put in enough 80-hour weeks to grapple up the chain. It’s hard work -- good
work. It makes me feel useful.

In the summer of 1984, when Byron was processing my transfer to Dallas, I requested to be
placed for a few months on a deep-sea drilling platform in the Gulf. I wanted to see where the
cash came in. I can tell you with no reservations that the people who work on these platforms are
complete red-faced morons. They are entertaining in a way that respectable people never will be.
There is simply no telling what they are going to do.

My third day on the platform one of the pipelines underwater exploded, pounding hundreds of
thousands of gallons into the water around the platform. I was instrumental in organizing the
recapture crews; the rig executive, an enormous British expat, was drunk during the whole
process. He claimed that being totally bombed helped him make big-picture decisions. Sure, why
not. The more he drank, the more adamant he got that he loved to drink martinis, but all I ever
saw him drink was Jack Daniels from a tiny wrinkled paper cup.

A few days after the pipeline explosion, late at night, I was watching the rain come down,
hanging my wrists over the rail. It was warm, and the air smelled like hot metal. Simon’s light
was on. I had to assume he was up there, a few stories above me, drunkenly staring out at the
same thing from his office. The wind was going pretty hard. A water spout, something I had seen
a few times before, formed right over the heart of the slick and started spooling up the oil and
carrying it into the air in an opaline braid. The rain started coming down harder and lightning
began to strike. As it struck the base of the waterspout, flames rose slowly in spiral ribbons
toward the thick black clouds above them, and my eyes opened wide in disbelief of what I was
seeing. It lit up the seascape and the waves in this dark red, and I saw, coming from the base of
the rig, Simon flying toward the column of fire in a Zodiac, yelling something that sounded
through the driving rain like, “Jericho!” Who knows what the hell he was yelling, really ...

THE WAY THOUGHT MOVES
LxWxH (xSC) March-April 2012 "StaticCharge"
Essay by Andrew Bartels
The Way Thought Moves

I recently had a conversation with the poet Caleb Thompson about the difficulty
of “following a thought,” of moving logically from a preposition to a conclusion. He
had been reading quite a few essays and was perhaps feeling awed by the talent
these writers possessed of cutting through the static of daily “thought.” I replied that
good essays are not an accurate record of a mind in motion (the literary equivalent of
Muybridge’s photographs might be the Surrealists’ practice of automatic writing)—the
mind works through tangents, association, gaps, false memory, distraction. An essay
that is well-structured, revelatory, and dense with meaning attains its form because the
writer is able to rearrange thoughts on the page, to discover connections, and cut out
fluff—to craft meaning.

If the essay seeks to clarify by cutting through static, maybe the paintings of both
Kimberly and Robert build a static charge. In certain paintings that are densely
patterned (whether the angular, “shattered” structure of some of Kim’s large works, or
the sinuous tangled lines in Robert’s), a spark between the abstract mark and its array
of visual suggestions produces—to continue the electrical metaphor—an alternating
current in the brain. This visual energy engages the viewer in the same mental
exercises as the painter. In this case, the exercise is not of depicting a scene, but of
moving from mark to mark, from thought to thought, in a constant attempt at discovering
form and outdoing the self. The “big picture” can never be taken in at once—and why
should it? All the fun and pain are in the details. These small images of Robert and
Kim are all detail, sections of a larger project of perception, maybe even gateways--
electrical conduits—to the larger works.

Traveling through the Dark

A writing professor of mine once said that writing a novel is like driving at night on
a deserted highway. You can only see so far ahead, yet within this limited circle
of illumination you are able to navigate the rest of the highway and arrive at some
nameless town.

Getting it Right

Language is a game of combination, of picking up one word and seeing how it looks
next to another, another. Gertrude Stein was a champion of this game. Her poem “A
Center in a Table” begins: “It was a way a day, this made some sum.” I feel I know
exactly how this sentence was written, or at least how the first rhyme, “way” and “day,”
lead to the second rhyme, “some” and “sum,” and the cleverness of that discovery. Can
there be such a thing as visual rhyming? Kim has often talked about value in reference

to her paintings—that is, different colors that have the same lightness and intensity (just
as “some” and “sum” have the same sound-value). Stein claimed to be trying very hard
to capture the essence of objects in these poems, but as much as she may have been
reacting to a visual world I think she was (inevitably) reacting to what was on the page,
her own words. Later on in the poem:

        “Next to me next to a folder, next to a folder some waiter, next to a foldersome waiter
         and re letter and read her. Read her with her for less.”


The slightest variation of “next to a folder some waiter” yields a “foldersome waiter.”
The latter is surprisingly evocative, and illustrates Stein’s “innumerable efforts to make
words write without sense,” which she found “impossible.” In general, painting may have
a visual parallel—the associative quality of blue and sky or water, green and grass,
red and blood—that accounts for the suggestiveness of the most abstract of paintings.
The meaning of words and the associations of color, however, are a given. A more
interesting parallel can be found between Stein’s signature repetition and Kim’s sort
of visual “echoes,” repeated shapes and gestures that vibrate outward from a central
figure. Like a stutter, the repetitions give the sense of consecutive attempts to get
something right. When one is dealing with a difficult subject, the gesture of a shoulder,
for instance, one must fixate and draw it again and again. For instance, the gesture of ashoulder happens again and again. One must fixate on the shoulder to get it right.

HOMESTEAD
LxWxH (xHS) November-December 2011  "HomeStead"
Essay by Rachel Shimp


“I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.” His paws would sometimes be bloody, leaving rose-like prints on Annie Dillard’s body, as she writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  

Francesca Lohmann mentioned this memoir, the first page of which reminded me of another recommendation: “If you want to make your house a home, get some cat.” I know that my friend Lucie meant “a” cat, but I prefer her sentence construction. (Articles are scarce in Czech. You simply order “pivo” or beer, and receive one.) The vagueness of it seems romantic: it could be that some alley cat, louche, homeless and handsome, will wander into my life. Who’s that you’re living with now? “Oh, just some cat…” 

It could be incorrectly plural: I will have some amount of cat, maybe many cat. It could refer to a piece of cat—the furry ear, tucked-under paw or the flexible hind-leg. Perhaps you’re familiar with the weirdly affectionate biological urge to bite a chunk from your beloved companion. I surveyed my small cat’s body for the choicest morsels, in case of an apocalypse…I decided we’d make a better team for the hunting and roasting of rats. 

Now some cat sits on my shoulders as I write, insouciantly taking up space. In two years of rearranging 300 square feet, I’ve only just become as comfortable as this queenly creature became in two weeks. Out from under the tub—where I shuddered to think of a swampy mold growing around her feet, where I hadn’t looked in a long time, until she made it her hiding place.  
Here, she is masterfully flattening her body to hide behind the scalloped edge of a high shelf. There, she makes flying leaps into nooks and crannies in pursuit of a pen. She’s a wild thing tamed, and still acting out. 

In each draft of the story of my life, I consider what it takes—besides a warm body, and especially in the absence of one—to feel at home inside four walls. Will I always act out? Adaptability is at the core of being comfortable in the world. I don’t belong anywhere, so I can be everywhere: what an incredible idea. ..

THE CURRENT
LxWxH(xFL) September-October 2011 - "FeedbackLoop"
Essay by Emily Pothast

I.


Being is as it always has been and always will be: happening. This is the Current.

The Current has no qualities of its own.  Rather it takes on the qualities of all that influences anything that happens. This is the modulation of the Current.

The Current is outside human control. (Indeed, it is the Current that gives rise to human consciousness and all its attendant illusions, including that of control.)  

However, from a human perspective, intention and behavior may be observed to modulate the Current in dramatic ways.  Through intention and behavior, the Current may appear to take the form of artistic masterpieces, mass murders, etc.  This is the whole of human history.

The Current wants nothing.  However, the Current in the form of human consciousness wants survival, comfort, beauty and a whole host of other tangibles and intangibles, only a few of which it understands.  

In seeking to gratify these desires, the human consciousness modulates the Current.  
In seeking to eliminate these desires, the human consciousness modulates the Current.
In seeking to observe the Current, the human consciousness modulates the Current
[and thus itself]. ....

Hic et Nunc Dimittis
LxWxH(xIV) July-August 2011 - "IncorruptibleView"
Davidson Warren Burnam

There's a lot of good argument that art and thought are linked, equally that art skews the framework of thinking, if only to momentarily blur (some probably already misapprehended) information.  Amanda Manitach's and Derrick Jefferies' deflected representations are feints that seem deliberately designed to provoke an initial, unedited, unskewed read and a ready connection to the existing phenomenal catalog.  But, as is often the case in art, duration erodes assumption and bares endless agendas of the depicted to satisfy fully what is represented only partially.  If a faithful representation in art serves the site it aspires to substitute and to which it points – away from itself – then these “missteps” lead back into the thick of the work, into its space, by constantly switching the referent's loyalty to the outside, back inside and then outside again.  This toggle speaks to the empty index out of which both Amanda's and Derrick's visual vocabularies sprout.

Derrick's off-the cuff alchemy and Amanda's florid niello meditations picture the sine qua non – the twice-represented image of reality – and the fleeting apparition of prima facie thought itself.  Their images lure and then arrest the mode of measurement that is a parasite choking the voice of the never-before-seen, extruding causes from effects; their images diligently mark the traces of heretofore uncatalogued material properties.  

Both Amanda's and Derrick's work is hyper-rendered abstraction: so the image initially declares itself a replica but at such a remove from its original that it transmutes, through its appearing, the real materials of a dis/misplaced original. Their work suppresses image context.  Like a mental map inverted, cognition stalls as it mis-sorts information, giving shape to a repository of associative compulsion.  

Each builds representational diegeses (think Poe; think Shelley) upon encounters with the fleeting objectivities of their individual source material; representation in so far as it is 1) a support that renders the properties of light and mass in spatial simulacrum and 2) a temporal seam dividing the in/out of synchronicity with the present – but then with whole contexts, settings and place-names masked or altogether left out...




 

Toilets
LxWxH(xWC) April-May 2011- "WaterCloset"
Anne Blackburn

In a reductionist sense, toilets are in essence exercises in aim, gravity, and circulation approached with extremity of emotion—hygiene colored by wariness, desperation, gratitude, nausea, dread, relief.  Provided a toilet is not gross beyond tolerance and not out of order; ideally you visit and forget immediately—bodily real estate available for further gustatory delights, hands washed, you can now concentrate on other things.  The contents of your own plumbing are now circulating through the plumbing of the building and out to the street, to the wastewater treatment plant, though various hazily conceived or entirely avoided mechanisms, and you can move on unburdened.   

There is a reason birds shit before they fly.  

Just don’t think too much about plumbing when using a restroom on the 40th floor or on an airplane—sudden visions of pipes laden with liquid shit in x-ray vision, pumped up and down through the core of many a hi-rise or the tin can of a fuselage, veins of waste and recirculated air.  Mere feet away from that mahogany elevator or leather seat in coach is a netherworld of waste belying all these coded differences of class and caste.   It’s gone, but not that far gone.  
 
One of the most vexing human engineering issues, toilets are rightfully and proudly thrones and porcelain gods, outhouses, loos, pissoirs, latrines, crappers, thunderboxes and and—my favorite—the humble privy.  Private councils with oneself and ones chosen edibles and internal chemistry--solid, liquid and gas—ideally set apart, in quietude and outdoor loveliness, with a minimum of spiders, a maximum of ventilation, and a the light and rustle of a late summer afternoon.  I have many pleasant memories of privies from my childhood in the counterculture Rockies, including a sincere awe at the age of 7 that our family friend Marina had a spacious clean outhouse in a pine forest with two seats, a basket of magazines and lavender, and your choice of three kinds of toilet paper:  traditional toilet paper, newspaper, and corn cobs!  I could not have been more impressed, awed as I already was by her English accent and her blue tins of biscuits, which everyone else knew were cookies...

the banal, the biographical, and imaginary landscapes of interiority
LxWxH(xNW) March-April 2011 - "NorthWest"
essay by Amanda Manitach

A few years ago, before I ever knew Sharon Arnold, I came across a post on Dangerous Chunky - at the time one of Seattle's only art blogs - about a subscription project Sharon was considering starting in Seattle. I’d recently moved from Portland and around that time Portland Art Museum was exhibiting a large number of German Expressionist prints that included extracts from the Die Brüke editioned portfolios, an annual project that was launched in 1906 and continued for seven years. I was so enchanted by this idea after seeing the Die Brüke portfolios that when I came across Sharon's proposal I immediately contacted her, enthusiastic. (As chance would have it, we now live two blocks from one another and can frequently be found drinking coffee or gin gimlets together at neighborhood haunts.) 

It’s been a few years since then and Sharon Arnold has turned LxWxH into a reality. The subscription model still holds its appeal - equally practical, collectable, intriguing (who doesn’t enjoy the Christmas-like thrill of opening a package containing unknown things?). Since Die Brüke there have been numerous other subscription or portfolio projects, and with this inaugural issue LxWxH joins those ranks as an innovative, sustainable way for art to find its way into the homes of young and experienced collectors alike. At a time when the arts are once again in search of more experimental venues through which to exist and communicate, as well as new media and new economic platforms on which to continue building shared visual languages, philosophies, and expression, the exploration of this kind of alternative venue is especially relevant.

As well as being a timely project, the physical format of the packaging is interesting since it exerts a specific influence on the work being made for it. In this context, the grey clamshell box (at once a parody of the white cube and its fundamental opposite) is a highly permissive playground for artists to make anything they please, as long as it fits within the perimeters of the box. It’s an exemplary means of preventing, as Seth Siegelaub put it, the gallery "tail" from wagging the art "dog."  ...