Mr. Blake Cook

Earlier in the summer I got a hold of one of my favorite people of all time and talked bout how we had to get together but nothing ever happened. Then tonight my phone rang and there he was!! Blake Cook calling!! This is him:


He's famous!! Since I stopped taking classes at his school, the college started using him in a bunch of promotional material! He tells me he's on a billboard somewhere on 480W too! We had good laughs bout this. What a classy picture hes got himself here on this brochure!! Very nice!!

If I had a list of favorite people I've ever known in my whole life Blake would totally be number 2 or maybe three, but seriously high up there!! We met up at a tiny bar he knew on Miles road and we chilled for 3 hours.

Blake does mostly installation art and it is always the most crazy, mind boggling things of all time. We talked tonight about how a lot of times people will just laugh or wonder if he's trying to trick them or something mean like that. But what's crazy is that if you can get him to talk about his work, it all makes so much sense that there's nothing strange about it at all! It's the opposite; they're all about the most sincere and inspired things I've stumbled into.

One piece I got to witness was at a group show he had in Cleveland. He took a tiny room in the gallery and completely filled it with cardboard. He then took a chainsaw to it all and slashed a real narrow little passage through it. When the show opened, it was called, "Anticipating our Reunion via Blood Clot". People gathered in the narrow little cardboard hall and got real uncomfortable trying to squeeze past each other while scraps of cardboard came dusting down about them. People were claustrophobic in there! But after thinking bout the piece and having Blake explain it to me like 100 times, this is perfect and intentional! The stuffy opening forces viewers to actually witness and think about the uncomfortable, dirty, not healthy little spaces that heart attack victims have in their bodies!! It's all about death, too, and I'm sure Blake means for it to run much deeper than what I've explained. Anyhow, afterwards it's clear that his chaos has a point. It's just saying, "hey! check this out! Think about this!".

That's what I take from it. I think a lot of people think that installation and modern art must be impossible to grasp or something, but from what I've taken from Blake I think it's all just funny ways to say, "Hey did u ever think about this??".

Thanks Blake! Hope I haven't slandered you!!!