I found this, as the watermark might suggest to the more clever of you in the audience, on “There, I Fixed It,” the only site in the Cheezburger empire known to routinely amuse and amaze me with its feats of sheer humanity. The site exists to showcase kludges: those haphazard, impromptu, and often ill-advised solutions to problems.

Thing is, I’m not convinced this is a kludge.

I mean, for one, only one of those locks are attached to a non-bike, as near I can tell.

They’re also all the same silver-to-black gradient.

So’s the bike.

Man, that many u-bolts would cost a fortune.

Nope, this is definitely art. You want my guess, it’s an installation piece commenting on us as both a paranoid society, one that needs to lock, relock, and triple lock even the most minor possessions to feel safe. Sadly enough, we’re also a society where someone somewhere would steal that bike if it wasn’t locked down, because, well, that’s what some people do. It just feeds back into point one as a nasty loop, which this does a pretty good job of reflecting upon. It’s a farce of minor theft and disproportionate paranoia (those u-bolts had to cost more than that bike. There’s what, over three dozen of them there? At a bargain-basement $10 a piece that’s still $360!) My best guess on the gradated color scheme is the visual texture it adds to the piece, the silver highlights draw our attention to the individuality of the u-bolts, letting the full seething mass of it strike us without the complexity of hue, and with merging into a giant hairball of metal as it would in true monotone.

So, c’mon, whatcha think gang? Poll after the jump.

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I propose that an artist’s underpainting is a lot like a fingerprint, unique and resilient to change. I knew people who strove for completely even fields of color, who blocked out the composition, and who even still did cartoons.

Me? I’ve worked in a few styles these past seven years, but I still start with a loose scribbled mess of thin color on a coarsely primed field. Makes it more fun.

So, it’s no secret that I prefer making my own stretchers for economics and scale, but man they’re a bitch to make. I just lost two hours to ripping, bevelling, mitering, and assembling new stretchers.

On the plus side I have a shiny new 2×3′, 2×4′, and 4×5′ paint stretchers. I should be set for a while.

By the way, the 2×4 is destined to be the long-rumored stablemate to “Boy Meets Girl, Girl Is Bitch.” Oh yeah.

The groundwork on my criticism of the tradition of self-portraits, and my first self-portrait in many years.

So, below is the first snap of Vanity Affair with the rough of the paint sketch in place. I really dig that underpaint, might leave most if it showing like I did way back on Pumkin…

So, in another installment of “geez, that took way to long, Zed,” I finally got the 10th installment to my long in progress Simplicity photo series. While I was at it, though, I also decided go through and get a way to add statements to the more abstract or experimental projects like this, so that’s good, right?

Anyway, find the newest installment, as well as the new statement and the revamped cart system, here: http://zedmartinez.com/photo/simplicity/?pid=108

So, recently I posted my somewhat unexpected stance (especially from me) that nudity does not make something artsy. Last night, I was discussing it with my pal Nakul and his friend Ash, both of them distinctly opinionated and interesting debate companions. And, I suppose to make the point clear, I do think that nudity can be art, I’m just saying it isn’t by default. A square is a rhombus, a rhombus doesn’t have to be a square, yadda yadda.

But, I wanted to illustrate this point to them with a work last night and couldn’t find it. Lucky for me I have the advantage of time and internet tonight, and was able to scrounge up this photo from Noah Kalina. Without a doubt Noah Kalina is my favorite artist working in photography right now (wanna know why? start by looking here, here, here, here, and especially here). And, part of why he’s my favorite is that, despite having more topless women than a strip bar, whenever he breaks out the skin it’s always breathtaking, interesting, or so at odds with the rest of the photo that you spend the next twenty seconds trying to figure out why that girl has no shirt on. And, while it’s a trick he uses time and time again, somehow he keeps shifting the context so that while you can start skimming past them faster, it’s rare that any of them are such that you can offhandedly dismiss them.

Case in point, this screwball shot with the topless brunette on a hillside with a Big Gulp. The day I figure out exactly what this means is the day I’ll finally decide to finish reading Finnegan’s Wake. After all, the infamously complex novel might be easy sailing if I can decipher this. But that’s the magic. If the girl were clothed, this would still be a good shot for the art world (the commercial world would of course scoff it away immediately, and that’s a shame). But she’s not clothed, and that adds the extra impetus to stick with the photo, and it keeps adding back into the off-kilter atmosphere. It brings something unexpected to the scene, and just as unexplained. It adds mystery, and mystery is good.

So, last night was 2009′s “Art vs Art” out at the Vogue. For those who may not know, Art vs Art is an annual event here in Indy. The idea is, one weekend artists come out and have 4 hours to complete a painting with provided materials. Then, those works are put online and are voted on, and a selection (16, I think) go on to the main event. At the main event, two paintings are chosen at a time, and the audience cheers and shouts for which one it likes best, and the winner (as measured by a digital decibel meter) goes on to the next round. The loser is placed in a workhorse while a giant wheel of awful deaths is spun. Before the death is carried out, the painting gets one last shot, and an on-the-spot auction is performed, with starting prices based on the round ($150, $250, $250, or $450). If no one saves it, it’s subject to being hacked with a clever, a chainsaw, smeared with shit, pummeled by a jack-hammer, etc…

So, this was the first time I got to attend the main event. It was pretty fun, but I think the real fun is in being one of the artists, so next year I’ll be participating. There was an upset near the end when in the last round the darling of the show, a pop-culture homage to Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes which became dubbed as The Beheading of Darth Vader lost to a very solid gothic piece the MC dubbed Bride of Frankenstein.

Things got a bit better afterwards, though. Despite its narrow loss, The Beheading of Darth Vader did find itself a buyer, and survived the night. The year’s grand prize winner, in a statement of what I assume was defiance (since she mumbled enough for it to be indiscernible from the audience), opted to try for more than the $3,500 prize,

which meant letting her work risk death at the wheel. And so of course the wheel landed on “Instant Death” and the piece was artificially separated via chainsaw. C’est la vie.

Another painting died via Dirty Sanchez. Seriously. Latex glove, bucket of manure, and some stlylish gestures ended in one painting wearing a stankstache.

There were a few nice works, though I don’t yet know who to attribute them to. Find all of them on their site (at least at the time I’m writing this) at http://www.artvsart.com/, and some of my favorites or memorable ones after the jump.

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Nick and myself have been pondering starting a Grimeycast for a while now, and over the long weekend at fellow Grimey Max Brustkern’s digs, he re-presented the notion that we should really just all read the same set passage of James Joyce’s infamous masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake and then have a debate about what that passage even said. An idea which I’m actually all for.

It has been said that Joyce, having used as much of the English language as could be used in Ulysses, proceeded in Finnegan’s Wake to make a good and solid attempt at using everyone else’s languages as well. Five eyar’s ago “AJ” from Maryland said the following about the novel in a review on Amzon, and from what I’ve read myself I haven’t found a more apt assessment of the work:

The language in “Finnegans Wake” is a continuum of puns, portmanteaus, disfigured words, anagrams, and rare scraps of straightforward prose. What Joyce does is exploit the way words look and sound in order to associate them with remote, unrelated ideas. For example, his phrase “Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies” may sound familiar to those who happen to know that the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet are aleph, bet, gimel, daled. “Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphul of rhyme” recalls a nursery rhyme that may reside quietly in your most dormant memory cells, while “Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager’s virtue” sounds like a drunk auditioning for the role of Hamlet. Imaginary adjectives that pertain to letters of the English alphabet are employed to describe Dublin as a city “with a deltic origin and a nuinous end.” “Finnegans Wake” is the ultimate in esoterica, and what you get out of it depends largely on your store of knowledge, so that upon completion, with a mutual wink at Joyce, you congratulate yourself for being so clever.

The idea of a group discussion is, I’m almost sure, occuring to Nick because of my many discussions about the merits of Tom Robbin’s under-appreciated masterpiece Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, in which Switters, the main character, is a member of a group of CIA agents and related trouble-makers and intellectuals who get together infrequently to discuss Finnegan’s Wake in all-night bravado sessions featuring more alcohol and bullshit than a cattle ranch after a whisky rain. And having attempted to read the Wake myself, I think Robbins might have been onto how to actually read that sucker.

And, I need to read Finnegan’s Wake anyway. While I seriously doubt it’s as influential a work as Tristram Shandy–which set the ground-work for what would much later become post-modernism–Finnegan’s Wake is at least the most obvious influence on another of my favorite works of literature, the mind-baffling and circuitous Only Revolutions by Mark Z Danielewski. While both Only Revolutions and Finnegan’s Wake indulge in stream-of-consciousness verbal cartwheeling on top of a circular narrative that renders both of them nigh unreadable, that’s also what gives them their magic.Reading it through one is almost always either one of the most frustrating, exasperating disappoing experiences of your life, or one that’ll gnaw at the back of your mind, forever inviting you to do it again and again until the walls of the insanity dissolve and leave you understaning the majesty that you just know is lurking in there somewhere.