When he traveled, John Singer Sargent carried his watercolor kit, just in case.
Below, Venice, 1903
Charles LaBelle also makes art as he travels, but in his case, he makes it everywhere he travels, at least in places with structures on them.
Since September of 1997 I have maintained a database of every building that I have physically entered.
A record of each building is made upon entering the building for the first time. This information is subsequently entered into the database.
Additionally, the database is supplemented by a photographic archive of each building. Each building is photographed, if possible, before entering it. However if a building is not for any reason photographed, it is still recorded in the database.
The database includes the date and time I entered the building and the building location (street, city, state and country).
As of January 2009 there are approximately 9,200 buildings in the database with additional buildings being added almost daily.
The photographs themselves are never to be shown. They exist as raw supplementary data only. Rather, the project, whose true site is the realm of perception and consciousness, is represented by the database itself and occasional drawings of individual buildings made from the photographs. When executed, each drawing is done in brown watercolor pencil on sheets of paper ranging in size from 4 x 4″ to 9″ x 12.”
It is not important that the drawing be done at all.
Archaeologies of the future here, 268 drawings and counting. They are part of his continuing exploration of psychogeographics, the relation between place and the person in it, him. I love the rough drafts he’s posting on Facebook:
He describes them as:
a limit of space, not a space: the limit where space becomes pure time,
but where pure time annuls the event. No passage, no coming, no
departure, no birth or death, no attraction or excitation of a new
subject, and consequently no disappearance of the new, no abolition of
its novelty in its other absolute novelty that is its empty place or
its tomb. No not.
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