A Link to Mike Kelley

With not much creativity on my part, I view the internet as a big black hole where everything gets dumped and where you enter at your own peril in search of anything specific.  It is a place where everything is and thus nothing much exists very meaningfully.  Into this dumping ground I often pitch some of my thoughts and images with very little expectation that any of them will make it unto any shore.  Very occasionally, and what to me seems miraculously, for better and for worse, my blog entries actually get read by someone. …And what a bunch of mixed metaphors this opening paragraph has turned out to be - hah! 

Although Voo d’Art exists in blog form, I actually put it together more as a whole: one piece about one specific artwork of mine.  It is not a blog to which I post about any other artworks (mine or not), or where I disseminate periodical information or thoughts about anything else; that I do on my Raving Artist Wife blog.

I have not posted any new entries here since I completed "this piece" in August of 2010.  I’ve just let it float in the seas of the internet like a bottle with a picture whose "stats" I look at only to bet with myself on how many days it will “flatline”. Yesterday however, my little bottle of a blog actually made it to some far off shore and I received an email from someone at Artsy.net, who must have combed the internet as if she were Mark Tansey's Robbe Grillet Cleansing Everything, telling me she had found it.  

She enthusiastically requested that I link my blog to the Mike Kelley Artsy page.  I love Mike Kelley’s work and told her I’d be honored to put a link to his page on my page, so here it is, click on it: 

Mike Kelley's Artsy Page

The Evolution of a Joke

photo by Carlyn Tucker
stand by John Foster

I started this piece in response to an irritant and as a tongue in cheek game to dispel personal demons, not as art.  I did a quick and dirty Google search on how to make voodoo dolls, made one, and started impaling her with pins in an orderly fashion. 

I have always loved Lucas Samaras’ work, especially all those pieces in which he obsessively covered and transformed objects of personal significance with pins. 

Lucas Samaras

The act of repetitively and consciously skewering and transmuting my own object with pins quickly became reflective, and I acquired a haptic sense of appreciation for what Samaras had done so long ago.  Still fun to make, the doll was no longer just a joke.  Altered physically by acquiring heft and an outer shell, it became a fetish embodying characteristics that also had to do with art.

From the beginning, as part of the joke, it was my intention to photograph the doll after each “pinning session” and to download the pictures to a blog I created for that purpose at  http://voodart.blogspot.com/.  In all but the last couple of entries in which the doll’s face is covered and defined by real multicolored pins, I had fun using Photoshop to virtually cover her face with John Baldessari-like face-obliterating shapes.   And as I played with these during the object’s physical transformation from doll to pin cushion, I forgot Baldessari’s and started creating masks of my own. 

John Baldessari and Mario Sorrenti for W Magazine, November 2007

At some point during the process of photographing and blogging, I also decided to compose one picture using the blog entries in order to have it printed on paper, thus effecting one more transubstantiation from virtual into real space as I had done with the use of colored pins on the doll’s face.  What started as a joke acquired a transformative magic all its own; and when Flemming called telling me she had run across my blog and wanted to show the doll and its evolution at Riverworks, the metamorphosis was complete.   

                                                   

education complete

tall and proud

transubstantiation

eye

see