Month: February 2015

For Those of us Who Keep Journals

 Bridge over Outlet Bass Lake
photo by Will Hardin. Bass Lake Outlet
Journal entry
Vol. 44:
Friday
1/11/08
After 5576 pages (since 1987… earlier volumes destroyed), nothing could be clearer. My journals don’t aspires to “literature.” To be sure, there are moments–caught up in passing enthusiasms–whole volumes when plain insanity wears the mask of “art” –but day after day, page after page, what I’ve compiled is nothing more (or less) than a verbal equivalent of the middlebrow albums of the snapshots my family used to keep.

Moving pictures.

Like the reels and reels of 16 mm family movies–long since lost. Moments, images, brief visual narratives I hope to return to–and save from the ever changing sequences of organic memory. Something external, I tell myself. Like a photograph. Like those lost silent movies. No less subjectively framed, so no closer to “truth”, but at least–external. Free of alteration.

Vane hope. Every reader, and every reading… rewrites what is read. But at least, I tell myself, the words remain. There. In their original sequential order.

So many pages, so many words–an embarrassment of false memory, a presence that begins to weigh on my life (is that why I’ve burned ten-year segments–twice?… since my earliest entries… 50 years ago?)

Memory serves us to our advantage–only to the degree that we retain the power to transform it.
Anything less, is …?

If this is so for us as individuals… how much more is humanity burdened by the false memory of history?

If it’s our lot–condemned to misremembering, erasing the violence we have done, to ourselves, to our fellow creatures on this earth, let us begin to remember forward, to creatively body forth from imagination, a world where there will be no need to forget the horrors we seem unable to face in our past.

Not Quite There…lost… and not yet

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This sense of being at the end, and how, as an artist, I feel we have been wrenched loose from the idea of posterity that for so long was both a prison, and a liberating force in Euro-centered art.

Here’s a post from January, 2008.

In Hermann Broch’s novel, The Death of Virgil, the dying poet and the Emperor Augustus enter a prolonged dialog, an argument on statecraft and poetry, on duty, and–what is ultimately at stake here, the survival of the Aeneid. Their discussion turns on Virgil’s claim to the right to his own work, the right even to destroy if it does not fulfill what he believes to be his more profound duty to it, to the duty of art.

There is a mild earthquake in progress…

Without comment:

Caesar paced back and forth over the swaying floor; with every dip of the wave he turned round so that he was always walking up-hill; but now he must have reached the top for he stopped–yet maybe he did feel the Poseidonian movement–and held on to the candelabrum: “Again you speak of things that cannot be proved.”

“In art we are everywhere imitating the Greek forms, in the conduct of the state you are forging a new path. You are fulfilling the task of your time, not I.”

“That proves nothing; the newness of my path may be argued, but eternal form remains eternal forms.”

“Aye, Augustus, you simply do not want to see, you do not want it to be true, that the poetical task no longer exists.”

“No longer exists? No longer? You sound as though we were standing at the end of something…”

“Perhaps it would be better to say, not yet! for we may assume that a time for artistic tasks will dawn again.”

“No longer and not yet,” –Caesar, much dismayed, was weighing these words–“and between them yawns an empty space.”

Yes, no longer and not yet; that is how it sounded, how it had to sound, lost in nothingness, the lost, passed-away inter-realm of dream…

… isn’t this where we always find ourselves ?

Random thoughts on Art… and blogging, from 2008

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In searching The Dog for posts I thought might be worth dragging back into the light, I came across this, from September, 2008, the year of the great financial meltdown, and the last fall term I would teach at St. Joe’s. A rambling, introspective reflection on what it meant for me to be an artist–four years before I’d begin to make visual art again. What caught my attention was the mention of neolithic cave art–having just read Stephen Mitchelmore’s wonderful review of Georges Bataille’s book, La Peinture Préhistorique: Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art, on his post, Book of Forgotten Dreams at This Space.. Do take the time to read this–a beautiful piece on our need to return to the place where human art began.

I had asked, why am I compelled to enclose the word “art” in quotes?

I grew up–was raised to a state of awareness by artists, living and dead–from mothers, uncles, siblings–receding all the way back to those strange stick figures who dabbed in charcoal and ocher by lamplight with marvelous precision, a catalog of animals their contemporaries were, at that very instant in time, engaged in exterminating. To claim a place in the pursuit of the arts is not a claim to a special class: no. What bothers me is the class of “art” itself.

As impossible to define as “religion.”

As impossible to define as what it means to be “human.”

I’ve become aware of something… of more than a few somethings… since beginning this blog a year ago, July. …that this is writing of another kind. I make no pretense to making art… One of the things I’ve become aware of: that what I do in the realm of art… ( a category I don’t trust even exists… ) I do in private. Turning my efforts over and over.

A short story, Godzilla’s Eye, of some 5,00 words… I have more than 500 pages of drafts that went into that throw-away effort. Nice that the Laurel Review thought to publish it… but who reads these little reviews? A few dozen people, if that.

I spent almost a year on that story. Not all my writing is so labored–but the point here is the element of privacy: privacy of composition. And my thought is… that the “art” is not in, maybe never in, the end “product.” The story that found a place on the pages of the Laurel Review.

Art, I though, does not exist–not as the “product'” I use the quotes here as defense against the common associations with the word… .”product.”
Is this what I mistrust? Is this why I place quotes around the word, “art?”

If what you see, hear, feel think…. respond to, in a work of art, is about nothing but the finished “product”… you have missed. Not a part. But everything.

The finished work is not the art–it’s the best possible suggestion the artist could come up with for what really matters. Suggestion. Not an end point, but an invitation back into the process. An invitation to an endless conversation carrying us forward.

So I re-write my posts. Edit on line. What matters… is process. And in process…we are all participants.

And yet I recoil… I post and delete…

To act with others, before others, unleashes unpredictable reactions.

To do that… to be able to do that… is the very definition of Trust–in ones self. The thing no artist can be without.

Compose in public.

Performance.

I’ve been doing this with my posts for months…then waking in a panic and deleting them.

So what… if what matters is PROCESS.

We need a new form of critique.

Nothing new here. A return to engagement. Real encounter… where what matters is the process, the journey…

Encounter… not to own, but to be infused in the aura of impossible distance. Discovering ourselves in what we have made– more truly and more strange.

From December, 2013 #65 #68 #74 by Willard

#65 Dec 30 12

#65 61x61cm Arcrylic on wood, with paint can lids, wood strips, paper street dirt.
I scrape curbside dirt with its bits of glass, fine gravel and shreds of this and that for texture and modulation on wet paint. Framed with wood from an abandoned building.

#68

$68 November Alleghenies. 28x98cm Rusted metal cabinet door, dirt, twigs acrylic

#74

$74 76x13x32 cm. Auto bumper from car accident with acrylic shadows.

Georges Bataille, The Impossibility of Literature

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(from the Barking Dog, November, 2008) The essays in the beginning of Georges Bataille’s THE ABSENCE OF MYTH, Writings on Surrealism. are primarily of interest for the light they shed on Bataille’s early conflicts and later reconciliation with André Breton and on the history of surrealism: its flowering between the wars and transformation and reemergence after the liberation. The later essays deserve consideration in their own right, quite apart from their place in the history of a literary movement.

I would single out “War and the Philosophy of the Sacred, “Poetry and the Temptation of the End of the World,” and “Surrealism and God,” but those on Jacques Prévert, (From the Stone Age to Jacques Prévert), René Char (René Char and the Force of Poetry), Camus’ (The Rebel (The Age of Revolt), and his critique of Blanchot on Sade (Happiness, Eroticism and Literature) represent aesthetic critical thinking above and beyond.

Begin with the impossible. And never back off.

If you want to think about, to write about “literature” (I am more and more estranged from this word… let’s go back in time and call it all poetry… and what doesn’t come up to poetry (or merely aspires to it without overwriting all earlier attempts to define it, is merely “literature.” What we called the glossy hand-outs at the auto show when I was a kid in the 50’s).

“…poetry is…literature which is no longer literary, which escapes from the rut in which literature is generally entrapped. For us, ‘poetic’ cannot have a set value in the same way as an Anjou wine or a piece of fine fabric–if you want to think about poetry, there’s no where else to begin.

… but with the impossible.

You have volunteered to be shackled to two draft horses. They are pulling, one to the north, one to the south. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to never give way to one side or the other, even as they tear you, body and soul, asunder.

Making Art Outside the Machines of Power

Given that art has human value (without– or suspending definition of what that is), it follows that the labor of the artist merits support. This entails meeting basic human needs for the artist, seeing that tools, supplies and space for making art are available. How that support is offered, where and by what means it’s obtained is not a matter of indifference for art or artist, but will have the power to affect and control both art and artist.

There is an unavoidable entanglement of the production of art and artist with the economic, social, political, and cultural, machines (thank you Levi Paul Bryant ), through which support is procured. The gallery-investment-collector-museum-gentrification-reward-machines will select that which maintains and enhances their operations, and reject what threatens them. The flow of money is the mother’s milk that fuels these machines, and those who control the flow of money will not abide anything that challenges their territorial power. If you are an artist, and court what passes for ‘success’ in this system, you will, no matter how firmly you believe in your aesthetic purity, or how hard you work to compartmentalize your creative work to shield it from the machinery you have made yourself dependent on, you will be making art that serves that system. You will be a useful servant of the Empire of Money and Death.

There was no need to define the value of art and the artists labor, because it will be defined by the machines that distribute the reward and how they make use of it. Artistic freedom will be the reward of the parasites, the rebels, thieves and refusers. When you see one of those great, expensive, powerful works of public art, those magnificent museum worthy pieces, made possible by grants and awards, by the flow of money–tell yourself, that is not what artists who value their freedom do. That is not what a free creative soul aspires to do–it’s a temptation, a seduction to join the stable of the pimps who run the machines… the machines that build the prisons and make the drones and turn everything human into a means of profit. Why am I not hearing this conversation from artists everywhere? How do we survive without supporting the machinery of slavery and death? What kind of art can we make–how does that change what we are given to do, how does that shape our creative vision? Why am I not hearing this conversation from artists everywhere?
April, 2014