CORN NUDES
I’ve been thinking a lot about combining two themes I’ve been exploring: corn and nudes.
Along the way, I’ve been collecting thoughts, phrases, images and ideas about where that combination might lead. This is a live document. It may eventually grow to include more complete ideas for individual pieces, but for now it’s a place to dump all the little nuggets I collect before they fall out of my head and disappear forever.
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- uncanny orderliness of the Midwest
- The nude selfie is a body disciplined into an image.
- The weeds in the ditch are more representative of what this place naturally is than the cornfield.
- offensively benign.
- Each becomes this tiny interruption in an otherwise absurdly controlled biological surface.
- a grain elevator
- a farmhouse
- a water tower
- a turbine
- an interstate overpass
- a utility pole
- an abandoned silo
- a billboard
- a church steeple
- a little copse of trees
- a drainage ditch
- a single volunteer plant
- a deer standing at the edge
- a highway sign
- a motel sign
- a truck stop sign
- Piekets are rows of corn stencils
- rows of kernels on top of row of plants
- the gaps betwen pickets could reveal chaos of weeds.
- each picket could have a different scale, colors, background color,
- And corn itself doesn’t have to be the villain.
- Corn didn’t do anything.
- We did.
- Poor stupid adorable corn.
- CROP
- top of plant that is cut off (corn)
- cutting edges of an image (selfies)
- same origin – crop the plant to get the product (corn), crop a photo to get the product (tits)
- FIELD
- manufactured reality
- straight
- distant
- repetitive
- orthogonal
- vast
- hard-edged
- public
- industrial
- NUDE
- crooked
- close
- awkward
- foreshortened
- intimate
- fragmentary
- soft
- private
- LOOK AT THIS BODY.
- vs
- LOOK AT WHAT THIS PERSON DECIDED TO SHOW YOU.
- The missing information becomes as important as the visible information.
- Face outside frame.
- One breast.
- Part of stomach.
- Shoulder disappearing.
- Bathroom mirror.
- Bed sheet.
- Doorway.
- Flash reflection.
- A hand holding clothing aside.
- The strange distortion produced by a phone held too close.
- Light blowing out part of the body.
- Blackness swallowing another.
- And that wonderful accidental geometry created because the photograph wasn’t composed as Art.
- It was composed as communication.
- Vertical seams/pickets could become:
- corn rows
- phone-screen divisions
- agricultural property lines
- body fragmentation
- There’s also a vocabulary emerging here.
- Not necessarily titles. Just words I’d put on your studio wall:
- CROP
- FIELD
- YIELD
- A field yields.
- A body yields.
- A photograph yields an image.
- An investment yields a return.
- A person yields control.
- EXPOSURE
- CULTIVATED
- VOLUNTEER
- SELECTED
- HYBRID
- FEED
- FERTILE
- DESIRABLE
- PRODUCT
- GRADE
- CHOICE
- FLESH
- ACRE
- BUSHEL
- BODY
- PROPERTY
- BOUNDARY
- CONTROL
- looking at things long enough that the familiar becomes strange.
- an adorable little ear of corn—the most harmless fucking thing imaginable—becomes the smiling mascot sitting on top of an enormous machine for turning land into product.
- Both the corn and the nude are cultivated images.
- unruly biological thing
- The edge where bedroom becomes field could have the same razor-straight quality you noticed along Illinois roads.
- nude, corn Hard edge
- weeds invade the nude’s space.
- the weeds are echoed in the crack between the corn pickets
- Pin up is commodity, corn is commodity…unnatural, cultivated, manufactured
- she holds corn, advertises corn, is corn
- on top of weeds, over lapped, dropped on, displacing
- Make her beautifully cultivated.
- Pinup language.
- Commercial photography.
- Maybe even some of your Sailor-Jerry vocabulary creeping in.
- Smooth skin. Lovely breast. Perfect curve.
- And behind her:
- ditch
- collapsed grain elevator
- rust
- concrete
- weeds
- utility infrastructure
- scrub trees
- power lines
- Corn.
- Pinup.
- Silo.
- Weeds.
- Angel.
- Turbine.
- Breast.
- Grain elevator.
- Banner.
- Farmhouse.
- Cloud.
- Utility pole.
- Heart.
- Highway sign.
- Now she’s functioning almost exactly like the perfect corn.
- She’s the desirable product sitting in front of everything required to manufacture desirability.
- LANDSCAPE
- 48 × 36″ vertical
- A woman’s torso is cropped so aggressively that it’s initially almost abstract.
- Tiny grain elevator.
- Tiny wind turbine.
- Tiny farmhouse.
- The scale relationship makes absolutely no physical sense.
- Intimate body / enormous landscape.
- The thing photographed from twelve inches away and the thing seen from twelve miles away occupy the same plane.
- WOOD
- vertical wood strips forming the panel.
- Some stop.
- Some extend.
- Some are slightly misaligned.
- Corn rows cross them.
- Body crosses them.
- Wild vegetation appears in the seams.
- Maybe certain passages remain bare wood.
- The object itself begins exhibiting:
- cultivation / interruption / repair / boundary / fragmentation.
- toward the less precious painting language without artificially “painting looser.”
- BREASTS
- Biological.
- Sexual.
- Nutritional.
- Commercialized.
- Private.
- Publicly regulated.
- Desired.
- Embarrassing.
- Motherly.
- Pornographic.
- Completely ordinary anatomy.
- exploitation?! They are sexual images!
- The woman who sends someone a titty pic knows she’s creating a sexual image.
- The recipient knows it.
- The little charge created by that exchange is part of the subject
- Sanitizing that would actually disrespect the phenomenon
- interested in
- sexual agency
- desirability
- presentation
- cropping
- transaction
- commodification
- the construction of an image,
- rather than simply saying I enjoy looking at naked women, therefore I painted some.
- Corn doesn’t excuse the nudity.
- Corn complicates it.
- And the nudity complicates the corn.
- That’s the double-good-idea thing
- avoid art school surrealism, clear environmental activism, ham handed narratives, just superimposing imagery and letting people figure it out. Keep distinct. Crisp distinction. Not blending and melting.
- Tit pic selfie with an ear of corn in hand instead of phone.
Every grain elevator is painted as though it’s the steeple of a cathedral devoted to industrial agriculture.
CONSTRUCTION
- Instead of layering, have the different picket cutouts meet with a clean edge like a puzzle
- pickets can be held with a think panel behind glued and tacked on
- imagery on panel bleeds through
- Precision isn’t the problem.
- Predetermination might be.
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Keep digging, WOODCOCK
