kill too hard

Lil' Wayne is going to be in jail soon. He's going to be out of our lives for a long time, and we need to think about that.

I believe in the metaphor "spreading yourself too thin." I think it can be a real thing, overextension to the point where the ends no longer justify the means, or where quality of the product suffers at the hands of overproduction. And that's the metaphor people have been tossing around in regards to Wayne, Lil'. Whether it's his involvement in rock and roll, or his constant outpouring of verses and obscure features, people are saying that dude has gone too far, lost the talent that put him on the map in the first place. That he needs to slowwwww downnnnnnn.

So let's dig in to this metaphor a little bit, "spreading yourself too thin." The implication being that rapping/making music is like "spreading," that one has a limited amount of butter, or art, to spread with, and if they choose a piece of toast too big, they'll be wasting their skills. Okay. So the toast is ambition, the butter is artwork or music, and the act of creation is not unlike labor. That all makes sense to me. But in regards to Weezy F. Baby, this conceals the truth. It implies that the butter is an object outside of the artist, an external, material rendering of his talent that is then packaged and sold to the consumer on the basis of taste. Furthermore, it implies that the artist has chosen to enter into relations with his field in the same way one might choose a summer job. That is, he wakes up in the morning and decides to get the butter out of the fridge.

The problem is that we can't talk about Lil' Wayne in a conventional way, with conventional phrases like "spread too thin." We must recognize that for Weezy art is not the "externalization" or "initiated activity" that the butter metaphor implies, but a constant state of internal creation, second nature, the result of which just so happens to be art. He's the first rapper to truly be raised in rap, encountering it in the same way that one might encounter their first language. At age 11, he was virtually adopted by the rapper and CashMoney CEO Birdman. At 13, he accidentally shot himself with a .44. At 15, he joined Hot Boyz and spit his first major label verse. We know the rest of the story.

What we're witnessing with Weezy, then, is rap music growing up and raising its children (I mean goddamn, Jay-Z is 41!). And like any good adolescent, Lil' Wayne is finding ways of rejecting the image of his parents, dabbling in rock and roll music with his album Rebirth, and taking the concept of "grind" to the extreme by generating an endless amount of material. And it may just so happen that some think this art is "bad" (or, like me, they don't), but maybe we should consider that what we're judging may not be art in any traditional sense of the word at all, but the result of a person trying to express their emotions, thoughts, and dreams, etc in the only way they know how, hip hop.

So when Weezy goes to Riker's, I think we're going to realize just how significant he really is to this rap thing. It's impossible to imagine the rap world without him, just like it's impossible to imagine Lil' Wayne without rap. The timbre of his voice is so recognizable that you might imagine producers wanting a Weezy feature in the same way they want a heavy synth line or a wicked drum sample, so deeply has he permeated the collective aural life. And in doing so, he has not spread himself too thin, but instead covered the entire planet in a thick, syrupy coating of butter.

Skin Deep

Leandro Erlich

Lately I've been turning over a relationship in my mind: how does the spatial dimension of a work of art change the way in which the idea behind it is expressed? The most interesting pieces (for me) fall somewhere in between the dimensions in some way, either through the experience of the work, or the work's direct affront to the spatial dimension it inhabits. This is not about time being the 4th dimension or some shit, though I'm sure you're science teacher in high school told you that. He was right, according to most scientific theory, but I'm talking about something else: spatial dimensions and our perceptions of such.

--Of course, every thing is in the third dimension, namely because it's impossible to see a 2D object at all. But let's assume that paper/drawings represent 2D, and speak within conventions for a moment.---

To battle the perceptions of a given dimension and make strides into the adjacent is an incredibly interesting one for me, as most artistic conventions divide the dimensions relatively strictly. Drawing is representative, Sculpture is plastic. But when a work falls between the two definitions, what do you call it?


The piece here is by Chris Duncan, and to me represents the first step towards the third dimension in the way it implies a depth to the drawing itself, without being a representation of any thing that has depth to it. The page itself is pushed beyond a surface. And beyond the skills used here, other implications of the physical world - like gravity - can shove a canvas into the space.
I love the distinct shift from taught (almost invisible) canvas at the top of the frame to the heavy, drooping materiality at the bottom. This work, unfortunately, is unknown to me (found at threedot). It only focuses on the subject matter of exhibition itself - no "content" on the page, no title, the viewer's usual spot taken up by the necessary broom. Is this sculpture? or some assisted painting, or something like that?


Materiality can play a huge role in this as well. The piece above, by Jen Stark, deals with our most 2-D material in our 3D world and unfolds the layers hidden under it, almost pointing out what we're ignoring all the time. The flower-like result is not without it's sharp edges, and I think they're the best part of it. The edges of dimension are what define our perceptions of it, and are impossible to see. We can't see the edges of the 2nd dimension, because that's the 1st dimension. In a similar way, we can't see the edges of the 3rd dimension, and so on. Sometimes we look for edges in worst places - like edges. But really, the edge is in a new direction, let's say outward.

Travess Smalley

The edge of a dimension is really where we can get caught between them. And in a more practical sense, the edge of a piece is what we most usually ignore to suspend out disbelief in the very agreeable silence and calm of flatness. To deal with the substance of a page is almost too much, it distracts from the content. But there can be another content which over-runs the border and edge of the page into space.

Space can also be flattened, made into a sensory experience devoid of depth, or made so gargantuan that is renders itself into a background. This might be why I'm so fascinated with the sky - It looks at once full of forms and a flat surface inside a curved bowl. But in fact it's a nebulous space that we simply can't experience with any other sense but our eyes. We're so far from it that all we see is a flatness that belies it's depth and almost immateriality.

Ryoji Ikeda

Once something is within the purview of space, it can either become an object within that space or an environment of some kind. These environments are where I'm interested in living, the ones that point to the immateriality of the third dimension, the pathetic roundness that we cling to as our save-all and our larger world. It's not there, in a way. Or, the environment we think we're in is really an object in a larger environment. I'm thinking Men in Black as I write this.

The immaterial aspects of what we're living in is what's truly amazing, the things that are outside our sensory perceptions and our conceptions of dimension at all. The piece by Richard Box, below, is a tool to see what we can't.
These fluorescent bulbs are powered by the ambient electrical fields surrounding the power lines in the background. But all we can see are the bulbs themselves. In a way, this is the perfect representation of what I'm talking about: a completely invisible but powerful thing that both makes art and talks about it's medium at the time.

you're losing a TABLE, you're gaining a masterpiece