Akemi and I are working on a publication to go in the bathrooms at SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries for an upcoming art show. We’re collaging text and images from various home & garden magazines into our own piece, called “Passages: Number 2″ (Akemi recently finished work on another piece called “Passages“) …

We came across this advertisement and after some deliberation decided it was too obvious to put in our magazine but not too obvious to hang in our bathroom.

It looks like I’ve been selected to show the LE prints as a part of the Chicago Loop Alliance’s Pop-Up Art Loop program! That’s cool. Basically, they take empty storefronts in downtown Chicago and let artists install their work in the windows. I’m not sure if it was started as a response to the shaky economy and its effect on businesses (putting them out of it) or what, but I think it’s a great program for property owners to be involved in, and for artists to get excited about.

Regarding getting excited, the E-Waste comment boards have been awfully quiet this summer. I’ve decided to try and reanimate the intelligent discussion my readers and I are used to around here with a contest:

Why does downtown Chicago have so many empty storefronts?

The “best” answer (as judged by me for humor, creativity, accuracy, inaccuracy, most cute animals involved in answer) will receive a free set of prints! Contest open to all Chicago residents. Entries from outside Chicagoland are eligible for victory but will be required to remit a $12 packing and shipping “victory tax.” Contest ends this Friday (the 13th!!). When posting your answer, be sure to use a valid email address in case you win. I’m looking at you, “notjohn@boredinthelibrary.com”

I just got back from a short stay on the West Coast. I was showing Liz around for what was her second visit to California, the first of her adult life, and her first-ever trip to southern California. Highlights were plentiful, but I think the most relevant tale to tell here has very little to do with anything:

My mom made us a delicious apple pie, but she didn’t have any vanilla ice cream to go with. She’s sort of lactose intolerant, so there wasn’t even milk in the house to drink with the pie. Being my mom, she offered to run to the store to get some ice cream for us. Being an adult, I ignored my burning desire to eat a whole tub of ice cream and told her that such a trip was unnecessary. She joked that she had some Klondike Bars that we could eat with the pie, and I called her bluff. I grabbed a steak knife and sliced the chocolate shell off the vanilla ice cream and voila-la-mode! It was pretty great, because then we had all these chocolate flakes to eat too.

Back in Chicago, I have a lot that I am about to start working on and I’m very excited about it all, but I don’t want to forget about the Limited Edition prints. I spent enough time making ‘em for “Christ”‘s sake. I think if I was ever in a real band, I would not like touring as much as recording — once I finish a project, I am fully satisfied with my accomplishment and ready to move on. That attitude is good for the ego, bad for the wallet. The call for a part-time Baskauskas publicist remains open. If you start working now, I will guarantee 15% of art-based income for the rest of our working relationship, as well as free entry and cheese at all art events involving me forever. Incentives will be offered.

Tomorrow: Part I of my futuristic sci-fi utopia tale!

I’ll be trying to show my Limited Edition work in various places for a while. My step-mom found this one, as she’s an active member of the book arts community. They aren’t much for verbosity — the application requires a 300-character (approx. 50 word) general artist statement (written in the third person) and a 150-word description of the work. That is not easy:

On one hand, Eric Baskauskas is interested in the loftiest of thoughts (oh, the enormity of eternity!). On the other, he grounds himself in details most minute and mundane (the dust on his garage floor). He suggests that these two realms aren’t so different. His hybrid content manifests itself in a hybrid practice: a mix of conceptual art and graphic design.

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Using print/books allows for a deliberate use of time — pacing and rhythm are essential. Thematically, my work deals with such things as youth’s disappearance, the apocalypse, and meals: beginnings, ends, cycles. Light and color are focal — not only does our relationship with the sun dictate the daily passage of time but also, simply, what we can and cannot see.

Time’s influence is evident in the process and materiality of my most recent work. I sandpapered all of the paint from the exterior of my Nissan Sentra “Limited Edition” and then painted it with gray primer. I saved all of the dust that came off the car during sanding, then mixed the dust with oil to make ink. I letterpress printed with that ink to produce an edition of prints. In the car and the prints, the end products are destined to live on, change, and eventually expire.

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We’re out of food again.

ericbaskauskas.info/LE
ericbaskauskas.bigcartel.com

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It’s been a long time coming, but at least I’m a day earlier than I expected. Extra special thanks to Liz for helping with the web design. News on art show/birthday extravaganza coming soon!

I’m writing a paper for a class; here’s a rough draft of the intro. Tomorrow: jokes about poop, hopefully.

I was at a bar celebrating something with a friend once, and he offered to buy me a drink. I asked for a vodka and soda, and he returned with a brown-colored beverage. Of course, he had taken the word soda to mean Coca-Cola. A “Classic” misunderstanding to be sure.

This anecdote highlights the key points I’m going to discuss here. What does it mean to be classic in our designed world? There are a few notions worth looking into, all of which are linked by the sense of endurance that comes with classic ideas, objects, and moments.

First, I posit that the most general sense of classic can fittingly be found in the generic — celebrating over drinks with friends at a bar. Imagine a classic hammer, a classic sweet 16 birthday party, or a classic Jackson Pollock painting. Here specifics aren’t necessarily of interest; we are more concerned with the whole of the thing and its exemplary nature.

When that classic Pollock painting of yours becomes so important that it’s an example not just of his work but of the medium, or when club soda becomes Coca-Cola in your cocktail, you’ve entered another dimension of classic: that of the transcendent singular. These are things that have been tested by time and come out victorious. This status can manifest itself physically (as in the case of the Coke bottle and logo) or conceptually (when “soda” = Coke).

Aside from the concept of timelessness that classic things connote, both of the above distinctions also touch on the elusive third form of the classic, and also the first definition offered by most dictionaries: quality. Chances are your hammer is classic not because it looks like all other hammers. Rather, all hammers look like yours because that particular design set a standard of excellence and use value which all hammer-makers have since adopted.

It is without a doubt quite easy to foresee fluid semantic exchange between these different categories of the classic. This makes complete sense, and shouldn’t be of concern. When our classic things eventually make it to the landfill, there will be plenty of physical interaction anyhow. I do hope the text that follows will allow for some clarity, however, as we try to parse the different options facing us when we declare something to be classic.

By the way, as far as fluid physical interaction goes, there’s a reason you wouldn’t call vodka and cola a classic drink.