Rehab Residency

The tendonitis in my left arm is getting better. I'm still feeling it. And I wear wrist braces all night and much of the day. Wearing wrist braces might not make immediate sense when the problem is with my elbows. But the braces keep me from hyperextending the tendons all the way up the arm -- giving them a chance to rest and heal.

After months of not rowing, I began this year spending some time on the erg. I started slowly. Really just stretching, not even working up a sweat. Five minutes every two or three days.

By the end of January, I decided to begin increasing my efforts. I spent February and March at an artists residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire (an amazing place!). I spent most of my time drawing. But rehabilitating and traning for my row was equally important during my time at the residency. I set up a video camera and recorded my training every day. Who knows how much of this documentation will make it into the final video that I edit when I'm done with this project. But some of the footage is quite nice. Thank you to T Kira Madden for assisting me on the day that I did naked erging amid the piles of snow (I never saw the ground during my two, freezing months up there).

The good news is that I went from 1000K every other day during my first week to 5000K near the end (I actually was up to 6000K but then a sledding misadventure set me back a couple of weeks).

Anyway, I am mildly optimistic that I can be on track to row across Buzzards Bay in July. Here are some video stills grabbed from the footage I shot a MacDowell:

ARTnews

I got a copy of the May issue of ARTnews today. I've been excitedly waiting for the issue because it has a review of my January show. The show presented work that is a prequel to my 2014 row. The writer, Elisabeth Kley, did a great job explaining the show and its relationship to the larger project -- not an easy task. I won't try to put into words how supported I feel when reading a (good) review of my work. All I will say is thank you Ms. Kley and ARTnews.

ARTnews MAY 2013, page 100.

reviews: new york 

Michael Waugh

Winkleman

     Michael Waugh's dense and absorbing exhibition was dominated by a delicate series of representational drawings created entirely out of tiny flowing texts copied from Adam Smith's 1776 The Wealth of Nations. The largest, a triptych, featuring a sinking steamboat engulfed by enormous waves, took nearly 1,200 hours to complete. Other images here included idyllic scenes of rowers in front of country mansions and portraits of handsome young oarsmen. All were visually airy and evanescent in spite of the labor they required. 

     The show was intended as a fundraising prequel to Rowing Back, a future performance inspired by the 1827 death of Waugh's ancestor Gideon Dexter, who froze in a rowboat while attempting to recover his employer's drifting sloop. Waugh plans to hand-build a boat he will row from the place where Dexter died to the site from which he departed, reversing the journey to symbolically recuperate his life. 

     The Invisible Hands (2012), a video documenting Waugh's preparations for this project, was projected on a wall monitor hung over a pair of handmade oars. Shot from a camera attached to the handle of a rowing machine, the film shows Waugh's body moving toward and away from the lens as he trains, with an almost uncomfortable intimacy. Footage of the oars' creation is also included, along with documentation of the unsuccessful maiden voyage in a [racing shell] that immediately capsized, plunging [Waugh] into the water. 

     Another video records one of Waugh's eight-hour readings of Smith's book. Audible fragments of economic theories float in and out of the viewers' consciousness while they look at the rest of the work, enabling Waugh's romanticized Arcadias to dissolve into Smith's impersonal phrases. The arbitrary masochism of Waugh's entire artistic enterprise underscores capitalism's human cost.

- Elisabeth Kley

Michael Waugh, Money as a Particular Branch of Society (The Wealth of Nations, part 17). 2012, ink on mylar, 22" x 28". Winkleman.

Queer Erg

Once again, I am working in overdrive, having set myself a crazy deadline. The prequel show of work related to my rowing back project is due to open in 22 days, on January 12. Since the biggest project still remaining to finish is video, and video is notoriously apt to have unforeseen technical issues, and the holidays are going to slow me down, I probably have seven days to work. Okay, I need to breathe.

I have all the video clips imported, and I have them roughly placed. But none of them are in sync with the sound. I haven't figured out the timing. And I need to reduce one clip that is an hour long to 5 minutes.

The hour long clip is footage of me using a rowing machine (an erg) at the YMCA, working on developing the stamina that I'll need for my big row. The hour wore me out. But the footage is kind of great. I mounted my camera on the handle of the machine, so I am constantly pushing the camera away from myself -- and then pulling it up to my chest. The wide-angle of the lens makes my chest swell to womanish proportions with every stroke. It's good, old-fashioned queering. And it helps to add dimension to the drawings in the show that have the most obvious queer content (such as the two crew-lovers in Restraint on Competition).

Tomorrow I'm packing up my computer and my editing drive and flying with them to my sister's house in Texas for a holiday with my family. I hope I can de-stress enough to be good company!